Mr. Papineau knew that he was speaking to cooks and he wanted us to give to table service the same passion and precision that we brought to plating the food itself. Use your common sense, he instructed, have confidence, and leave your old waiter techniques, if you had any, behind.
“The greeting includes the beverage list,” he said. “Ask if they would like something to drink. Don't say,
âHi.'
Don't say,
âHowyadoin'?' Don't
introduce yourself by name.” And when we saw that the table had finished and needed a check, “Don't mention the C word. Why?
Cuz.
”
If there were questions, ask, and he or Craig would instruct, even if the room were full of guests in the middle of lunch. This was a classroom first, he reminded us.
“The customers are not here to challenge you,” Mr. Papineau concluded. “They're here to dig the scene.”
Mr. Papineau covered a lot of ground in an hour and a half. Some of my fellow students took notes; others simply listened. How could they be absorbing everything? I was trying to write everything down and could scarcely keep up, so relentless was the volley of information. It seemed only twenty minutes before Mr. Papineau said, “O.K., family meal's up,” reminded us that at eleven-twenty there would be final inspection, and headed us into the kitchen to pick up plates of soupy lasagna prepared by the last class.
I was assigned back-waiter duty the first day and therefore did not interact with the customers. Bradley Anderson, a twenty-two-year-old from Wisconsin who asked to be called Shaggy, was the front waiter. He waited tables at American Bounty (which often hired extra waiters in addition to those in the class), and he liked front-of-the-house work so there was little new about this to him. The day proceeded calmly because of Shaggy, because Papineau limited the number of reservations accepted on Day Ones, and because there were two people serving every table. Most of my time was spent standing in the corner with my hands behind my back, rocking from heel to toe, waiting for my tables to finish eating so I could clear and reset. This was going to be easy.
Â
Â
W
hen I asked Craig why he had chosen to do his fellowship in St. Andrew's, he replied, “Mr. Papineau. He's the
man
.”
Philip Papineau, in my mind, was set somewhere in the 1950s in New York City, a bachelor in a small, dimly lit apartment. At night, he would read the newspaper in his T-shirt and slacks, a small plate with half a sandwich to his right and, perhaps, a full glass of tepid water; later that evening he would be seen by a neighbor closing his apartment door, turning the key, and, immaculately dressed, he would stride into the New York City night.
It was not my inclination to create unlikely fantasies about people I watched, but there was something about Mr. Papineau's dark eyes, dark complexion, and broad shoulders that gave him a studio-era leading-man look; his face was long, his dark hair cut short. His beard was heavy but he was always so cleanly shaven that his jaw and upper lip seemed almost to shine. He moved as elegantly as a dancer. He was likely none of the things I saw in him; perhaps he was simply so polished that one could see any number of reflections in him. In truth, one might call him a career waiter; he took his first order at the age of eighteen. The man loved table service, he was expert, and like every great teacher he was able to convey his personal love of the subject directly to his students.
In his lecture on table-clearing he noted that we should, between courses, clear all silverware. You understood this man shuddered at the thought of a customer taking a food-smeared knife or fork off a plate to rest it on the tablecloth. “How many of you have put dirty silver back on the table?” Mr. Papineau asked, raising his own hand. “Come
oooon
,” he said in a deep, smooth voice. “Get your hands up. Everyone has done it.” He waited for everyone to raise their hand, then asked, “Why?”
Todd Sargent said, “We don't think we're gonna get it
back
.”
“Right!” Mr. Papineau exclaimed. “We have been trained by bad service. It's a survival technique: âHang on to your knife,
buddy
. You're gonna
need
it.'” We would replace silverware frequently; no food was to be brought to a table until the table had been properly reset by the back waiter.
A question on coffee would raise several dimensions of coffee service. I had already poured coffee for a customer and the coffee had splashed over the rim of the cup and into the saucer, enough to create a puddle in the saucer. I had asked if I might replace the cup and saucerâwas this correct?
Mr. Papineau instructed me to take it one step further: “Offer to take it awayâ
while
you're reaching for it.” This gets Mr. Papineau thinking: “A word on coffeepots,” he said. “Coffeepots with short stems are drippy. Long spouts, like the ones we have, drip less. Don't overfill a coffeepot; if you
overfill it, it can
jump
out of the pot.” Once he started thinking about coffee, it seemed he couldn't stop. “Never serve warm coffee,” he continued. “There is nothing worse than warm coffee. People will buy it iced, and they will buy it hot, but nothing else in between. Some people like coffee”âhe stopped, rose slightly on his toes, and extended his chinâ“
melting
hot. Normally older peopleâI
don't
know why. It must be the dentures. If this is the case, make sure the
cup
is hot. If they can feel it on their lip”âhe lifted a mug from the demo table he worked during lecture, pressed it to his lower lipâ“they will
perceive
that the
coffee
is hot.” In such cases we wanted the mug hot as a soup bowl. And coffee, of course, would get him thinking about tea. “Who's a tea drinker?”
Mimi Anchev, twenty-three, from Westchester County south of Hyde Park, confessed with a tentative hand.
Mr. Papineau glared at her, leaned in, and said, “Oh, you are a
fussy
lot.” To the class he said, “Tea service can be
very
complicated,” and into tea service he sailed.
“Kids and the elderly,” he explained, “are very needy, very selfish.” Always, he said, attend to the children first. “If you make the kids happy, then
who's happy
?” He paused. “It's not a difficult concept. Who has made a lot of money on just that?” He paused again.
“McDonald's.”
I grew to understand that Mr. Papineauâ“I am a nut for communicating through gesture,” he often saidâwas less a table-service instructor than a professor of sociology and behavior.
One had to be such a creature if one were to be excellent because one had to know what the customer wantedâwhether it was water, to place an order, a warmer temperature in the roomâthen fulfill the need. “And to do this,” Mr. Papineau said with a reverential hush, but without losing volume, “
before
the customer
knows
they
need
it.
That's
where it's at. People will spend more if the service is good.”
Why? They tend to order the extra course because they trust that it will arrive promptly, and they tend to up their tip by 1 to 2 percent, which is all that you can reasonably hope for. “You've got the big tipper, and you've got the tipper who's incredibly stingy,” Mr. Papineau offered sagely. “Everyone else falls somewhere in between. You're not going to change that. You're just looking to move it up one or two percent.”
Mr. Papineau stressed promptness. “If you're late,” he said, “your service will always be on the defensive.”
He could not emphasize this enough. You had no idea how long the time
can seem, he said, especially if you were a deuce. He asked who had a second hand on their watch. He said, “Time
one
minute.” And Mr. Papineau began. He waited. He appeared to be listening for a small noise, hearing only silence. It seemed a long time before he spoke. With his volume a notch lower than normal, he said, “Can't we get a
drink
?” Disgruntled but patient. He then waited. He looked right, looked left, looked right. A minute passed, and he said, a little more loudly, “All we want is a drink.” And then, after what
had
to be yet another minute's wait, he whispered to his imaginary date, “Should we go somewhere else?” When the two people timing both raised their hands to indicate one minute had elapsed, he said in a loud, angry-customer voice, “We have been here for
ten
minutes and can't even get something to drink!”
He shed the angry customer persona, lifted his eyebrows, and tilted his head:
Am I right? See how long a minute can last?
Those who had waited tables were already nodding. Mr. Papineau said, “You can't say, âExcuse me, sir, but it's only been
one
minute.” Timing, promptness were crucial. “These are big issues,” he said.
Service today is just terrible, Mr. Papineau would say often. He didn't necessarily want formal, he wanted professional. He wanted polish. “I can tolerate technical errors, I suppose,” he said. “I will not tolerate rude, flip behavior.” I wondered what it would be like to go out to a restaurant with Mr. Papineau, hear a play-by-play analysis of the service. “For a hundred bucks,” Mr. Papineau said, “I don't want
rude
. I want smooth. For a hundred bucks,
I want smooooth
.”
He lifted a napkin from the demo table and snapped it free of its folds with a muffled pop. “I like show,” he said, “but I'm not big on woofing napkins. If you
do
have waiters woofing napkins, make sure
everyone
woofs napkins. Don't just have one guy woofing napkins.” Mr. Papineau was a fine actor and could caricature customers' behavior. “When someone goes to the bathroom?” he said. He lofted the napkin into the air and turned his chin up away from the table. The napkin landed a third on the plate, a third on the table, and the rest draping over the table's edge. Mr. Papineau looked at his audience, raised his eyebrows, and nodded. He said, “Just,” and he lifted the napkin by its edges, folded it twice, said, “I'm not big on touching other people's napkins, just fold it,” and he set it beside the plate, then over the arm of the chair, either one was fine. “So.” He turned to the class. “
Don't
try to refold it into a pheasant.”
There were, of course, many
don'ts
in table service. Mr. Papineau jammed his hands into both pockets, rocked from heel to toe, and looked exaggeratedly around the room. “This means,” he said,
“not ⦠ready.”
“Don't eat, smoke, or drink during service,” he continued. “Don't do it. Don't
run
through a restaurant. People think there's a fire. When they see a waiter running, it makes them nervous.” Finally and importantly, he said, “You can't laugh. If you're laughing,
who
are you laughing
at
?” The whole class chuckled. “And you
know
there's a
lot
to laugh at,” Mr. Papineau said.
Table service was a gorgeous craft to Mr. Papineau. You had not perfected it, he said, “until you can fade into the woodwork and still be in the middle of the room.”
Papineau's lectures were not all sociology. They were also formal lessons. He had a large easel with a drawing board onto which he'd drawn a diagram identical to the one on our dupe padâfour course columns running across the top, and seven seat numbers descending the left edge. He turned it away from us, had four students take seats at the demo table, and performed proper order taking. “Grilled beef tenderloin,” he said, writing this down, but the point he stressed by caricaturing his own perfect execution was to repeat aloud what had been ordered to ensure the waiter and guest were in sync. “And how would you like that cooked?” He repeated while writing: “Medium rare.” And when he had finished the table, having collected all menus, he turned the board around to show us exactly how what had been communicated at the table should appear on our pad.
As always there was something big about Mr. Papineau's movements. He was on stage before us and his actions were loud as stage whispers. When he arrived at the table he didn't simply walk up to it; he more or less
zooped
, his feet arriving first, followed by his waist, shoulders, then headâa figurative indication of speed and promptness. And once he was in place he was Jeeves incarnate, saying in his confident baritone, “Good afternoon. Welcome to St. Andrew's Cafe.”
Refinement hid itself within its own virtue. One could not easily recognize genuine refinement because true refinement directed attention away from itself. What made Papineau such a fascinating table-service instructor was that he could reveal his refinement without losing it. He showed us how table service worked. He was the magician revealing to his apprentices the prestidigitations and illusions of his trade.
Â
Â
D
ay Two was my first day as front waiter. Shaggy, whose short hair was so blond it was nearly white, would be my back waiter at tables forty-one, a six-top, and forty-two, a four-top. Mr. Papineau had inspired me. I could hardly wait for service. I was eagerness personified.