What I Learned From Condescending Customers As A Chain Restaurant Server

During a brief time in food service at a national chain restaurant, I learned early on to identify the type of diner especially flattered by any acknowledgement of expertise, regardless of whether such expertise wasn’t so much knowledge as opinion, or even accurate. Such diners want to be seen not as customers but as conspirators, excited by the idea of demonstrating for exhausted women in black skirts and uniform-issue high heels the long a in the pronunciation of naan with their watery butter chicken, or that they too are keenly aware that pad thai should not be made with ketchup.

For a while, I didn’t mind this kind of interaction. Tables such as these were predictable and easy to please—and, being barely out of my teens, I often mistook this quality for kindness. These diners were different than the high-strung people given to asking for the manager over a bent straw in a glass of soda, or who were convinced I’d added an item to their bill without asking. A woman once stopped her daughter from thanking me for placing her apple and Brie grilled cheese sandwich on the table, because, as she explained to her, people shouldn’t be thanked for doing their job. 

After that interaction, I couldn’t unsee it: the porous veil people actively cast over those engaged in any type of service work, filtering out their personhood, capable at any point of negating them completely should whatever desired act of service or care not be performed to their liking.

One night, I was assigned to the table of a couple who were returning at the restaurant’s invitation. They had been so unimpressed by their previous experience that they’d written to the general manager to express their dissatisfaction at what they’d been served. It was the beginning of my shift. One of them looked me over twice before giving his instructions.

“I want a real margarita. Do you know how that’s made?”

Imagine: a pink, freckled man in a polo shirt with a nicotine-yellowed beard looking a twenty-year-old dead in the eye and asking a question like this. At this particular restaurant we were: not allowed to wear flat shoes; not allowed to wear opaque tights; all but required to flirt with patrons in the lounge section of the dining room, in which men were not allowed to wait tables. But no interaction I’d had in such an environment, tableside or otherwise, embarrassed me as much as this one. Perhaps in part because of how I participated in it, too: I picked up their drink menus, cardboard slates covered in PVC pressed to look like leather, and did my best to smile.

“You know, most customers come in here expecting some sugary slushies with tequila when they ask for those,” I said. “But you mean en rocas, right?” I rolled my r’s better than in any Saturday Spanish-school diction test. This was good. It was, in fact, more than enough.

“The social equivalent of playing dead is to put forward a façade,” Nuar Alsadir writes in Animal Joy. While she is talking about pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theories on a person’s ability to express themselves completely free of socialized codes, the idea of performing authenticity as a version of playing dead—a self-negating cousin to code-switching—is a sickeningly accurate description of more of my earlier memories than I’d like to admit, whether or not it was for my own benefit.

It has been almost twenty years, but I remember the chit very clearly. Two glasses of an Ontario sauvignon blanc. A green curry chicken on rice, provenance unspecified. Steak frites, a house special. Two of those “authentic” unblended margaritas, made with gasoline tequila and served in glasses shoved directly into rock salt, instead of rolled at a slight angle to avoid over-seasoning the drink.

It was the best tip I ever received at that job. It was also the most instructive.

From Story of Your Mother, by Chantal Braganza ©2025. Published by Strange Light Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.