Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

Too dazzled to contribute, I watched them. It was the duality of everyone that floored me. Simone with her simple softness, her tired eyes. Will and Ariel snipping at each other. The talking got louder as the drinks receded. I kept looking at the open door, thinking a stranger would walk in and want a drink, or that the Owner would decide to pass down Sixteenth Street on his way home from an event and catch us and call the police. I’m new, I’m blameless, I would say with hands up. No one else seemed concerned. It made me wonder who really owned the restaurant.

“Black Bear?” Scott yelled down the bar to Ariel.

“No, Park Bar. Sasha just texted, he has a corner.”

“No más Park Bar,” he said. Jared and Jeff, two of his line cooks, started laughing.

“No you did not fuck the new one — Vivian?”

“Vivian!” they shouted. They raised their glasses.

“Full of shit,” Ariel yelled. She turned to me and said, “Fuck. I thought she was gay.”

“Too slow, Ari,” said Will.

“Oh we’ll see about that.” She put her hand on top of mine and said into my eyes, “They always start off straight. That’s part of the fun.”

I laughed. Petrified.

“What time is it?” I asked. A wall of exhaustion hit me with the drinks. It seemed to be a good moment to excuse myself. I didn’t know who was going to clean this all up so the restaurant would be blank and sterile for the morning. When I looked down the line I saw Simone. She was texting and I thought, It’s too late for her to be texting. That was when I first realized she was older. An image of him hit me in the back of my throat, just from habit. Who did Jake turn into when they turned the lights up? The shift drink — the first liminal space between work and my apartment, a space that I could project onto for hours, a space of inevitability where I would catch up with him eventually.

“It isn’t two yet,” Ariel said. As if something switched at two.

“Do you do this every night?”

“Do what?”

I nodded toward my glass of Boxler that refilled itself every time my eyes were averted. To the half-empty wine bottles that lined the bar for consumption. To Nicky eating cocktail olives while he and Scott told each other to fuck their mothers. To Lou’s gravelly serenade coasting down on us through a film of smoke. To the row of us, unkempt, glassy and damp, sweating drinks in our hands.

“This?” Ariel waved away the smoke in front of my face, waved it away like it was nothing. “We’re just having our shift drink.”

WHEN I STARTED they told me, You have no experience. New York experience is all that counts.

Well, I had a little now. A structure presented itself to me, like the grid of the city. There was the GM, there were managers. There were senior servers, servers, backwaiters. The backwaiters originally functioned as a holding pen where aspiring servers awaited transcendence, but there was so little internal movement, most of them seemed contented where they were. I had Heather to thank for my position — she had talked a reluctant Parker into serving after six years of backwaiting. That’s the only reason I existed.

The backwaiter had three kinds of shifts: food running (the carrying of plates), dining room backwaiter (the busing and resetting of tables), and beverage running (assisting with the drinks), which included a fair amount of barista work. I noticed that even though we rotated the shifts, people showed an affinity for one area and developed a schedule around it.

Will was an excellent food runner, with his Yes-Chef-No-Chef military mentality, his eyes-to-ground focus. So while he was a backwaiter, he also had some loyalties in the kitchen, which he exhibited in several annoying ways, such as partaking in kitchen beer, and complaining about “FOH” as if he weren’t one of the front of house.

Ariel loved the freedom of being dining room backwaiter. She waltzed around, picking up a few plates, topping off a few waters, polishing a few knives and nudging them into place on the newly set table with first a look of pinched frustration, and then placidity when it came together. And while this wasn’t true of all backwaiters, Ariel was generally trusted to talk to the guests. If the rest of us so much as said “Hello” to a table, a scolding was sure to follow.

Sasha was too good at his job to stay still. He got bored easily. If you put him in the kitchen, he could run your plates, drop off ice at the bar, and bus two tables on his way back in — all in the same amount of time it took me to find position 3 at table 31. It worked against him — I saw Ariel, Will, even the servers slack when they were on with him.

Which left me. For several reasons I gravitated toward the bar. First, because I noticed that there was a spot open to be the beverage runner. Second, because I had an aptitude for beverage running, cultivated over many years making hearts in mediocre lattes. The third reason was that it was a chance to get away from Chef in the kitchen. The fourth, or first, or only reason was that Jake was a bartender.

I assisted the servers in delivering their drinks to tables. I assisted the bartenders in keeping their bar stocked. I brought up crates of wine and beer, buckets of ice, ran the glass racks, the bar bus tubs, polished the glasses. If you were slow, the drinks were slow, and if the drinks were slow, the turn times lagged and we made less money. And then, about an hour and a half into each turn, the first espresso ticket would print. And then I was under it for the next thirty minutes.

At the end of the night the bartender made a stocking list and I put the whole thing back together again. Some people dreaded beverage running because it was a pure shit show for most of the night — you got hit with the drinks on the initial rush and the coffee on the tail end. Yes, my neck, my hands, my legs hurt. I loved it.

There was only one problem with my new position. The manual labor, the coffee — fine, that was the forty-nine percent of it. The fifty-one percent of beverage running was wine knowledge.

—

“APPETITE IS NOT a symptom,” Simone said when I complained of being hungry. “It cannot be cured. It’s a state of being, and like most, has its attendant moral consequences.”

—

THE FIRST OYSTER WAS a cold lozenge to push past, to push down, to take behind the taste buds in the back hollow of the throat. Nobody had to tell me this — I was the oyster virgin, my fear told me what to do when the small wet stone came into my mouth.

“Wellfleet,” someone said.

“No, too small.”

“PEI.”

“Yeah, some cream.”

“But so briny.”

Briny. PEI. A code. I took a second oyster in my hand, inspected it. The shell was sharp, sculptural, a container naturally molded to its contents, like skin. The oyster flinched.

I suspended it on my tongue this time. Briny means salty. It means made by the ocean, it means breathing seawater. Metallic, musky, kelp. My mouth like a fishing wharf. Jake was on his third, flipping the shells over onto the ice. Swallow, now.

“I’m going West Coast, it’s too creamy,” someone said.

“But clean.”

“Kumamotos. Washington, right?” he said.

“He’s right,” said Zoe, smiling like a fool for him.

I wrote it down. I heard him say, “Do you like them?”

I was sure he was talking to me but I pretended to be confused. Me? Do I like them? I had no idea. I took gulps of water. The taste stayed. In the locker room I brushed my teeth twice, stuck my tongue out to the mirror, wondering when the residue would go away.

—

THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON I was positive Mrs. Neely was dead, that she had died at table 13. I stayed away but kept her in my vision until another server went and revived her. She asked for more sherry for her soup. A shot glass for her soup, a glassful for herself.