Inspired by the angry rants of Bitchy Waiter and Waiter Rant and the likes of Anthony Bourdain, I've decided to
start a blog about being a cater waiter. A cater waiter works at catered
events: weddings, conferences, proms, art openings.
 |
| A murder of cater waiters. |
This differs greatly from a restaurant
server. If I take orders, it's usually from a menu no longer than four
items. Your eating times are scheduled. If it's a plated dinner,
everyone eats their salad, then everyone eats their entrees, then everyone eats
their desserts. Sometimes, there's a buffet instead (or even in addition)
of the plated meal. Often, there's butler passing of food or beverages,
where servers wander around with trays of food and harass you to eat stuff you could perfectly well get from a buffet yourself.
I am also a catertender, which is, you got
it, a bartender for a catered event. Sometimes, the bar is hosted and you
get to drink to your liver's discontent for free (well, actually, whoever
ordered the event pays for it, but you don't). Sometimes, it's a cash
bar, but this doesn't mean we don't take credit cards, it's just sounds better
than "cash or credit bar" or "bar at which you pay."
The selection of drinks is often smaller than a regular bar because the
catertender has to schlep all of her supplies and product to the bar (often a
shitty table with tablecloths to make it look purty) and inventory all of the
liquor before and after. It's bad enough to do this with 12 liquors, and
impossible with 60 liquors.
Tips are rare in catering. The
client is charged a "service charge" or something to that effect
which sound like a gratuity, but that doesn't end up in the server's pockets
directly. It's rare that somebody goes to a wedding and tips their
server, or that the convener (the person on the client's side who ordered the
event) wants to tips out 20 servers by herself. Plus, like I said, the
service charge makes it sound like that already happened. Our
salesperson, let's call him Party Turkey, is supposed to explain this to the
client, but he is a very lazy man and there's really no motivation for him to
do this. So the 20% the client sometimes promises to give us (a LOT of
money at some of these events) is rescinded,
Rather, we work for a wage. This can
vary widely. I used to make $15/hour, but I left the company, and during
that time, the owners decided to do a company-wide paycut because of The
Economy. Except for them of course. I got laid off because of The Economy
and came crawling back to catering, so I now make a little over $12. Not
nearly as much as I'm worth, but I guess that's the story with a lot of people
in This Economy. I've heard of wages $25/hour and up. It really
depends on who you work for.
I'm going to stop there, because there's
not enough lulz and too much exposition. For job security, I'm going to
keep this anonymous. If you know me well enough IRL, you could probably
connect the dots and figure out who I am and for whom I work.
