Mystery Waiter Almost Revealed
By CHARLES FERRUZZA
No one needs to tell me that a restaurant can seem like a psychiatric ward on certain nights (especially during a full moon). In the case of the author and blogger currently known only as The Waiter – he knows it’s true.
Before he became a waiter, he worked in the mental health field: “I was one of those guys who wore the white jackets and had to chase patients,” he tells me. “They would scream and yell all kinds of ugly, horrible things, but I learned I learned to keep my personal emotions to one side. That came in very handy as a waiter.”
Until July 29, The Waiter isn’t going to divulge his real name.
But after July 29, he’ll have outed himself to the world as not only the author of the new hardcover Waiter Rant, but as the creator of the popular blog, waiterrant.net. I spoke with The Waiter by phone from his home on the East Coast, though he’s reluctant to reveal even that location. “Just say it’s in the New York area.”
The Waiter isn’t being coy. He just wants a little privacy before his real persona is revealed to the world. Since 2004, this 40-year-old New Yorker has been the anonymous blogger who has been able to rant – and write -- candidly about restaurant life. His name and face will be all too public after Waiter Rant is released to bookstores. That’s OK, he says -- he recently retired from the food-service trade after ten years of waiting tables.
The blog has been his catharsis in coping with the stress of working in restaurants. “I couldn’t afford therapy,” he says, “so I started a blog instead. It was an escape.”
The Waiter makes one of his first public appearances -- and under his real name -- on Tuesday, August 5 at 6:30 p.m. at the Plaza Library, 4801 Main St. The library is bringing him to town for part of its Order Up! Tales From The Dining Room series.
Unlike most servers, The Waiter came into restaurant life late: He was 30 when he first put on a server’s apron. “By restaurant standards, I was ancient!” he says.
He studied psychology in college and worked in the mental health field for many years before becoming a server. It didn’t take long at all – it was at his first restaurant job – for him to realize that the restaurant business could be just as crazy and dysfunctional as any psychiatric ward.
“That first restaurant, which I call Amici’s in my book, was like being in a MASH unit. You know how you read about doctors in that kind of warfront surgical unit getting ten years of surgical experience in a single week? Well at Amici’s, I got ten years of restaurant experience in a week.”
The blog started as a creative outlet for his frustrations. “I started writing it and like any beginning blogger, I thought, ‘Why am I doing this? No one is reading it!’ So I stopped writing for a few months, but picked it up again and people started discovering it.”
After the New York Times wrote a story about it, readership swelled. At its peak, waiterrant.com had a million readers a week. “It’s about 7,000 readers a week now,” he says. “And that’s great.”
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