THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507070116
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 214 lines
It's well before sunup when 60-year-old Carrie Hardy ties the laces on her white tennis shoes and heads for the Courthouse Cafe.
By 5 a.m., she's making coffee and setting out creamers and jellies. At 6 a.m., the regular crowd settles in. It's Hardy's job to keep this coffee-swilling crew of local politicians, businessmen and retired people happy.
In fact, that's largely what waiting tables is all about: keeping people happy. Fat and happy.
Customers may think they are the only one whose happiness counts, but wizened waits know that they must also keep the hostess happy, the cook happy, the bartender happy, the busboy happy and sometimes even the dishwasher happy.
All the while, they are juggling dozens of tasks - taking orders, delivering drinks, filling water glasses, making coffee, adding checks, negotiating with cooks, filling soup cups, making salads, making small talk, making jokes, adding checks, cutting desserts, wiping tables, collecting money, folding napkins, slicing cucumbers and searching for clean silverware when there is none to be found. All in the time it takes to decide between a burger medium or medium-rare.
``Waiting tables,'' said Dr. Warren J. Jones Jr., a Portsmouth, Va., psychiatrist, ``is one of the most stressful jobs you can have.''
There are about 180 restaurants on the Outer Banks and an untold number of waiters and waitresses. From sunup to sunup, they deal with whoever sidles up to their tables. They include college students in for the summer, former college students who never left and those who never wanted to do anything else.
Hardy, one of the first waitresses in the area to punch a clock each day, is among the latter. She tried housekeeping in a motel once but went straight back to the dining room, where it gets so busy sometimes that she breaks into a run.
In an area fueled by tourism, Hardy estimates that her customers are 80 to 85 percent local. And they haven't changed much since the early 1950s, when she started on the 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift.
``Men I see here, they talk about the same things their daddies talked about - politics, children,'' Hardy said. ``And sex.'' She whispers the last part behind her hand.
Hardy keeps the customers happy by keeping them fed and watered, but a big part of her job - and a lot of waiting jobs - is trading barbs with clever customers.
``If they thought they could get my goat, they'd pick on me all the time,'' she said.
On a really good day, Hardy might make $70 in tips. But she works every day, wearing thin the soles on at least seven pairs of white tennis shoes each year.
The grind
Eight years ago, at the tender age of 16, Kim Franks became a waitress at RV's in Kitty Hawk.
``There were three men, and I got them water,'' Kim recalled. ``I dropped one of the glasses; it busted between this guy's legs. He was like, `Oh God, get her away from me.' ''
Kim recovered and is now head waitress at Sweetwaters Restaurant in Nags Head. Other harried waits, overcome with adversity, have simply laid down their trays and walked.
Melissa Wescott's epiphany came, oddly, at the hands of a local sandwich shop owner. Wescott, 26, a cook at Sam & Omie's in Nags Head, thought the guy should have known better.
He was placing an order and talking with his son at the same time. When Wescott posed a question, the man snapped, ``Don't you ever interrupt me, do you understand me?''
That was it. Despite an apology, Wescott sought refuge in the kitchen, never to return tableside. ``I don't have to deal with the people,'' she said.
That's the thing about waiting tables. The people. Customers can be whoever they want to be. Wait staffs must be witty, polite, masters of time management and able to take whatever the customers dole out - be it compliments or complaints.
``Your daily miseries and problems, hang them on the post outside the back door,'' said Karen Griffin, who has been supervising and training Outer Banks wait staffs for more than 20 years.
There's also the endless questioning, not only about food, but about the weather, the fishing, sunrise, the traffic and ``The Lost Colony.''
``All the questions,'' Griffin said. ``A waitress is really a chamber of commerce.''
The tradeoff is that the pay is good. The server may make more money than the customers - at some of the finer restaurants, waits might earn $25,000 a year, or more. And the wait may well be better educated.
Consider the staff at Sam & Omie's in Nags Head.
Buddy Johnson, the bartender, has a degree in sociology from Virginia Commonwealth University. Waitress/hostess Carole Sykes runs a Jackson Hewitt Tax Service in New Bern during the off-season. Waitress Karen Sealock has a marketing degree from Old Dominion University and is a certified emergency medical technician. Margaret Suppler, bartender, has degrees in psychology and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and owns a Jackson Hewitt Tax Service in Manteo. Waitress Sandra Schull is a certified masseuse. Nancy L. Dod, a waitress, has a degree in elementary education from the University of Tennessee. And waitress Dolly Jones owned a restaurant in Fairfield, N.C., but decided to go back to waiting because she didn't get to spend enough time with her family.
Even the college kid who is toting the fried soft-shelled crabs around the dining room may be a pre-med student. Don't forget that Mariah Carey, the singer, once waited tables.
Waits deserve respect and get it most of the time. One of the ironies of waiting tables is that the customers provide both the pleasure and the pain.
Vickki DuVal, 30, a waitress-turned-manager at Goombay's Grille & Raw Bar in Kill Devil Hills, has collected plenty of funny stories about customers during 10 years in the business. She's gotten all sorts of tips - food stamps, joints, T-shirts and even condoms.
Customers have even brought her plants and smiles.
``There are more good ones than bad ones,'' said Melody Leckie, 38, a waitress at Sam & Omie's. ``That's what you tell yourself.''
The nighthawks
At 10 p.m., the dinner shift is over and most Outer Banks waits are removing the last of the aluminum-wrapped spuds from bread warmer drawers, wiping the gook from the rims of ketchup bottles and filling the salt and pepper shakers. It's quitting time (or party time, depending on the lifestyle), but the graveyard shift at Bob's Grill in Kill Devil Hills is just getting started.
Wednesday through Saturday, these are the last waits on the beach to punch the clock.
Things here get off to a leisurely start. There's time for a smoke, a Coke, a chat with the ``swat team'' in the kitchen that is cooking off 40 pounds of bacon, 30 pounds of sausage and 100 pounds of potatoes to be consumed by the nocturnal crowd.
Around 10:30 p.m., one of the waits erases the dinner specials from the front chalkboard and prints the words: ``Eat and get the hell out!'' It's the motto here at this face-paced, late-night joint.
While flat pans of bacon sizzle in the oven, it becomes apparent that on this particular Friday night things aren't going so smoothly. First, the star waitress, the one who rakes it in on a regular basis, is reportedly en route from a Grateful Dead show. It's nearing 11 p.m. No one has heard from her, and the rest of the staff starts stressing.
This a stroke of fortune for submarine sandwich maker Michael Zablocki, 22, who came in at 10 p.m. for a job interview. Zablocki has waiting experience at a steak house in Queens, N.Y., and at the U.S. Open racquet club. He admits he's never dealt with what's about to come through the door at Bob's.
Hired - proclaims night manager Teresa Slovenski.
At 10:45 p.m., there's still no word from the star. So Slovenski dials up Debbie Beck, who just got off the 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift. She can't refuse; it wouldn't be fair to her co-workers. Beck wouldn't be able to sleep knowing they were in the weeds, wait slang for backed up and behind, all night.
At 11 p.m., the doors open with a short staff to serve a steady stream of customers. Barbara Ross, who has been sipping a Coke and smoking Salems since she got off the dinner shift at Pizza Hut, is called into the office. Ross is 26 and has been waiting on tables since she was 17. A veteran of the graveyard shift, she knows well the shenanigans of the nocturnal set.
``My mom swears I have some Dracula in me,'' Ross said. Slovenski to Ross: Hired.
The rush here starts around 2:30 a.m., when a long row of cabs lines up out front like planes on an airport runway. It takes a special kind of person with a coffee pot of patience to deal with this crowd, a point not lost on owner Bob McCoy.
``I had a waitress come in here drunk and had to send her home, so now I'm the waiter,'' McCoy recalls. ``First table I got, a four-top, I went up to them and said, `What are you having?' ''
``Hot cakes, ham, grits, hash browns, Coke and coffee,'' one of the guys said.
``That's for the whole table, right?''
Wrong, just one hungry dude that stumbled in from a bar.
Now the grill offers the ``garbage plate,'' a gastronomical terror consisting of a biscuit and gravy, hash browns, grits and baked apples on the bottom, a hot cake on the top covered with a pair of eggs, ham, bacon and sausage - all on a big, round, white plate. Cost: five bucks.
The garbage plate actually assists the wait staff because it gives customers - whose mental acuity may be dulled at 4 a.m. Saturday - a way to avoid making a tough decision. The waits don't have to stand there, pad in hand, shifting their weight from foot to foot, while the customer weighs the merits of over-easy versus scrambled.
``We're dealing with people who have been drinking for 12 hours and have had 25 or 75 drinks,'' McCoy said. ``Some of them can't even read the menu.''
Waits might have to deal with argumentative drinkers, people who have lost their wallets but not their appetites, and even an occasional food fight. But for putting up with this, they make up to $250 per night.
Some of this is alcohol-induced generosity, McCoy thinks. Customers slide out of the booth and plunk down a $20 for a $5 tab. The night that Bob waited, he made $40 in 30 minutes.
At 4 a.m. on Friday, it's still dark and pretty quiet at Bob's. The bar crowd has been replaced by the fishing crowd. They're a pretty nice bunch, according to Beck. No food fights, no sleeping on the tables.
It's nearly sunrise when Beck takes her tired dogs home, just about the time that Carrie Hardy starts filling cups and trading barbs with the coffee drinkers over in Manteo at the Courthouse Cafe. ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
ON ORDER
[Color Photo]
Cover photo by DREW C. WILSON
Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
Waiter Dave Dvoran of Goombay's Grill & Raw Bar wears a smile as he
shoulders a tray loaded with food.
Staff photos by DREW C. WILSON
Adam Goldman, who works at Sam & Omie's, heads into the kitchen with
a load of dirty dishes.
Staff photos by DREW C. WILSON
After a long breakfast shift, Sam & Omie's waitress Connie Kershner
finally gets to eat her own breakfast.
Carrie Hardy, 60, who works at the Courthouse Cafe in Manteo, is a
true veteran. She's been waiting on Outer Banks diners since the
'50s. On a good day, she can earn $70 in tips. But there's a price
for her good service: She wears thin the soles on at least seven
pairs of white tennis shoes each year.
by CNB