I am finally going to do a post of a typical day in the dining room. I’ve started this post a million times, but every time that I start explaining what I do everyday I get really tired. So. Here we go.
I’ll start by telling you about the layout of the dining room. On the Liberty, we have 3 levels of the dining room, deck 3, 4, and 5. Each has it’s own galley, or kitchen. The galley is in the back of the dining room and it’s where all the action is. When you look around the dining room, everything is so calm and smooth. The galley is the exact opposite. Waiters yelling at chef’s to hurry, waiters yelling at waiters to get out the way, waiters yelling at their assistants to get them something from the galley, dishes being thrown around, assistants pushing each other and fighting for glasses, coffee, tea. It’s a madhouse.
I usually try to get to the dining room by 4:00 to get everything ready. I have to make sure I have coffee cups and saucers, water pitchers, coffee pots, teapots, bread tongs, and water and wine glasses. Usually, I have to fix some stuff, which means I go around to other people’s side stands and steal their equipment. In my 2 months of experience I have learned that you can never have too many saucers. Never.
After I make sure I have all of that, I hide it. Put coffee pots on one of the chairs at your table and hide them under the tablecloth. Cups and saucers in the back of your side stand and cover it with a napkin. Usually this takes about 15 minutes, depending on how many things you have to hunt down.
After that, I head to the galley to fill up my water pitchers. Water pitchers are the most important things. If you don’t have 4, then your gonna be running back to the galley all night to refill your water, and there’s really no time for that. So after they are full I put them in my side stand and tie them together with a napkin. You can’t always hide everything, so you just make sure nothing is easily accessible. It will take someone who is “shopping” a minute to untie the pitchers, so they’re just going to move on to the next side stand instead of risking getting caught.
Now it’s time to set up the table. Not hard, just have to set up water and wine glasses. The waiter is in charge of the silver and plates.
Then, I gather all of my butter dishes and creamers, put them on a bar tray and head back to my cabin to put on my uniform, maybe take a quick nap.
About 5:15 I go back to the dining room to finish getting everything. Head back to my side stand to check the damage, meaning figuring out what babbaloos have managed to fix from me in the 45 minutes that I was gone. By this time, pretty much everyone is in dining room and fixing other people is really hard, so now it’s time for me to turn on the charm. Put on a really pathetic face and bat your eyelashes, “Vidal, somebody fixed all of my coffee cups, can I just have a few of yours?” Usually get 2 or 3 from a few different guys, and I’m set. I’m not proud, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Now is when it gets really ridiculous. Every night we have to serve condiments with the food. Sour cream for baked potatoes, horseradish for steak, mint jelly for lamb, brandy sauce, parmesan cheese, on and on and on. Assistant waiters must provide all of this when the waiter is serving the food. “Ma’am, would you care for some sour cream on your baked potato?” So at 5:30, the chefs bring out the condiments for us to put in bowls that we bring to our side stand. Kind of. Like everything else, there is never enough. And the chefs are busy getting the food ready, so we’re not their first priority.
So, for instance, the chef will put out a few boxes of butter. We all stampede toward the butter and start grabbing handfuls to fill up our butter dishes. Butter is gone in 2 minutes. We stand and stare and hassle the chef in charge of condiments until he brings us more butter or horseradish or sour cream or or or.
There are some condiments like the cocktail sauce for shrimp and mint jelly that the chefs make, so when it’s gone it’s gone. So then your stuck fixing someone else every time you serve shrimp. The next 20 minutes are spent in the galley yelling for condiments. If one deck runs out, you usually run to the next deck to see if they have any. I have found the deck 5 is usually the best for lemon, cheese, sour cream, and horseradish, deck 4 for cocktail sauce and mint jelly, and deck 3 always has butter the earliest.
And then there’s the bread. Every night at dinner, we serve a variety of bread before and during appetizer. Every cruise we have assistant waiters that are assigned to the bread line. At 5:30, the bakery in the deck 4 galley brings bread down to all of the decks. The 4 assistants assigned to bread line must then fill all of the bread baskets. There are supposed to be enough bread baskets for everyone, but of course, there never is. So about 10 minutes until 6 we all make a line and wait for the bread. This is the time every night when I wonder what I am doing here. Why am I doing this job? A head waiter oversees the whole thing, yells at us all to get in a single file line and come calmly when the bread line puts the last tray of bread in the baskets. It never works. The last piece of bread falls and STAMPEDE. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. People cutting in line, grabbing 3 bread baskets for their friends, elbowing, yelling, fighting. I hate it. I was talking to my friend Gustavo about all of this tonight. We were waiting for bread and I said, “Gustavo, do you ever think about how ridiculous our lives are? You’re one of my favorite people on the ship, but if you are about to grab the last bread basket, I will elbow you in the stomach and yank it out of your arms. And the bread isn’t even FOR me.”
When you don’t get a bread basket, you have to go to the bakery and fill your own basket. I have actually come to prefer this. You’re in control of how many sourdough rolls you get and you know how many of your guests eat sourdough every night.
So now it’s 6:00 and time for the guests to arrive. As an assistant, my basic responsibilities are to fill water, serve bread, give drinks, serve wine, condiments, and clear the plates. Sounds easy, and it mostly is but it can get hectic, especially when you have demanding guests.
After the guests are finished eating, I get to go wash all of the dishes. I load all of the saucers, butter plates, coffee cups, glasses, and silverware onto the waiter’s trolley and take it back to the dish ring in the galley. I have to put all of the dishes on racks and give them to the dish guys to put through the dishwasher. Then, I have to meet my dishes on the other side, load them back on the trolley, and set up for second seating. A lot of people pay the dish guys to put all of their stuff through the dishwasher first and put all of their stuff in the racks, I find that the batting of the eyelashes and sad face can sometimes work just as well.
So there you go. After I set up for second seating, everything goes pretty much the same. It’s an exciting life.
