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    Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip - Confessions of a Cynical Waiter
    Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip - Confessions of a Cynical Waiter
    Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip - Confessions of a Cynical Waiter
    Audiobook9 hours

    Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip - Confessions of a Cynical Waiter

    Written by Steve Dublanica

    Narrated by Dan John Miller

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    According to The Waiter, eighty percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining twenty percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths. Waiter Rant offers the server's unique point of view, replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen bits of human grace transpiring in the most unlikely places. Through outrageous stories, The Waiter reveals the secrets to getting good service, proper tipping etiquette, and how to keep him from spitting in your food. The Waiter also shares his ongoing struggle, at age thirty-eight, to figure out if he can finally leave the first job at which he's truly thrived.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJul 29, 2008
    ISBN9781423370741
    Author

    Steve Dublanica

    Steve Dublanica is the bestselling author of Waiter Rant, which spent twelve weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He lives in the New York metropolitan area with his joint-custody dog, Buster.

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    Reviews for Waiter Rant

    3.5/5

    532 ratings71 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Such a fun book! I need more! Highly recommend this!
    • 5/5
      Excellent look behind the scenes at how high end restaurants function.
    • 3/5
      Entertaining but limited in its scope of appeal.
    • 2/5
      I've checked off the "I have read it" box when I only read half of it. This book is a rant and I'm not sure why I expected anything more. I've been around many individuals who have spent time chasing money in the food services industry and it is a giant soap opera for them even when they step away from their workplaces. If you're not in this camp, it becomes draining to listen to. Dublanica does a fine job of sharing his years of waiter experiences, but it quickly becomes like bread left on a counter -stale. So, take this review as you will. I've heard all these stories before from friends who've been hosts, waiters, cooks, and waitresses. It lost all it's appeal years ago.
    • 5/5
      A great memoir and the narrator made this even better. Gritty, wry humor and an interesting story .
    • 3/5
      Light, real, and funny. Easy listening.
      Minor complaint: narrator's mispronunciation of a few words irked me - felt like it would have annoyed the author too.
    • 1/5
      Although this is ostensibly a collection of a waiter's experiences on the job, I hesitate to shelve it in non-fiction. Dublanica so clearly takes artistic licenses that very little rings true. There are a few sections that seem real, but the majority of this book is either Dublanica talking about how he's so much smarter than all other waiters&customers or psychoanalyzing himself. Not even half of the book actually concerns actually waiting tables. In every one of those stories, customers are either A)hot women who hit on him B)sophisticated patrons who understand how wonderful he is or C)twits he outwits&humiliates but gets huge tips from. I've collected some of these stories in the "status updates" section, but here's one of my particular favorites:

      "'You make the best cosmopolitans.'
      'Thank you, madam.'
      'I always tell my husband you're a great waiter,' she says. 'Very capable.'
      'Thank you.'
      The woman looks at me. She's about 50, her face shows the life she's led, but her eyes are warm and young.
      'But overly capable,' the woman says. 'I saw how you handled that woman. I was watching. You're more than just a waiter. Aren't you?'
      I smile broadly. Customers can be very observant.
      'Yes, madam,' I reply. 'Yes, I am.'"

      Oh, he's more than "just" a waiter? Is that why this book has all the life and realism of a lump of dirt? This book delivers very little insight into life "behind the scenes" of a restaurant, but a great deal of unwanted insight into Dublanica's narrow little mind.
    • 5/5
      As a former waiter I could so identify with this book. Everyone should have to wait tables to learn lots of life skills like people skills, problem solving, how to maneuver gracefully, and general etiquette. Well done!
    • 5/5
      After a stint in the seminary and reieving a degree in Psychology the write langours in a waiting job for six years. He does a fantaatic job describing his mostly younger co workers, crazy customers, and explains how tips inflate a waiters meager salary.and why such tips are squandered on booze or drugs by the majority of such workers. The book is broken down by holidays in so e cases, so it is easy to imagine the various times of year. I have had a few friends that were high end waiters and now can grasp what their lives must have been like. Waiters want the Fri-Sat shifts due to the volume of customers and the tips. Sunday brunch trnds to draw out the cheapskates. Wonderfully entertaining and there is a sequal I will listen to later on.
    • 3/5
      I am a full-time server... And have been so for 16yrs, and while portions of this sound familiar, a lot seems highly exaggerated and drawn out. Almost like it is mapped out to keep you from questioning it's authenticity. I enjoy what I do and reading this feels like he is talking down on the industry... Very basic, and a quick read.
    • 3/5
      This wasn't really what I thought it would be. I was hoping it was going to be focused more on the things the author had to deal with as a waiter. There was a lot of his personal story involved, and to me those parts of the books were not as interesting. I enjoyed reading the "behind-the-scenes" account of what goes on in restaurants, but could have done without the author's personal issues.There was A LOT of repetition in this book, and it slowed the narrative down. There were also some obvious typos. This book could have done with a better edit.Overall, not horrible, but not one of the best books I've read.
    • 3/5
      What is it really like to be a waiter? What is really the best tip in order to get good service and be remembered? Its in here.
    • 4/5
      adult nonfiction. Sick of corruption, the author quits seminary school to join the healthcare industry, but after struggling under similar circumstances, he decides to take a job as a waiter until he figures out what he wants to do next. One year turns into 7 years, and after successfully blogging about his experiences he successfully transitions into a writer. Loads of insight about the waiting profession as well as about life itself and the personal choices we all make.
    • 5/5
      Informative and enlightening side of the restaurant servers' plight of dealing with us, customers. And the fact that this is told by a 30 something and not a gum-popping teen gives it more credibility. I will never be so casual and insensitive to food servers again! A must for all.
    • 5/5
      Brutal and highly entertaining.
    • 2/5
      Some things should stay blogs. It's a very thin attempt to reproduce the formula of Kitchen Confidential, but it doesn't have any of the hard-won versilimitude, sharpness of observation or personal charisma of Bourdain's writing. It's not enough to show people life "behind the scenes" if the person showing it is not a very interesting writer.
    • 3/5
      Interesting & insightful.....

      He was especially clear about his own foibles, which tend to mirror my own.
    • 4/5
      This memoir is based on the author's blog of the same name. He chronicles the problems and people around him at his job at a high-end restaurant in New York. The book follows the author in his life as well as chronicling anecdotes and larger ruminations on life. He has an excellent turn of phrase, and an unflinching insight into himself and others.The first appendix lists what makes a good customer, the second lists what a prospective waiter should be wary of in a restaurant. If you liked Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential," you will probably like this as well.
    • 4/5
      Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential was all about shocking readers with gross conditions & practices of restaurants' food service and depravity of kitchen staff. Waiter Rant takes a gentler and more balanced approach while exposing the dining area. Customers, wait staff, owners, and managers are all fair game for skewering. Customers especially are portrayed as demanding and entitled. As other reviewers have pointed out, this is more a memoir than an expose. I liked that it served as a reminder that many workers in the service sector are underpaid and disrespected.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this book. I worked as a waitress when I was a student and I could relate to some of the things in this book. Some anecdotes about customers are very funny but the book also covered the dysfunction and unhappiness back of house. I was glad to read on the internet that the writer had totally abandoned waiting and gone back into healthcare.
    • 3/5
      I have reader's & buyer's regret, but just a little. I hate it when I interrupt my schedule of books to be read with a spontaneous gift-card splurge like this, and instead of putting it at the bottom of the list, spend the next 3 days reading it. It cracked me up sometimes, I learned a little bit, and I think Steve's a good writer. I hope he becomes a successful novelist after this pretty good debut. I don't actually recommend it to anyone I know, though.

    • 4/5
      I have been reading Good Reads reviews for a while now, and have learned a bit of code that works for me. If reviewers complain that the protagonist is arrogant, self-obsessed, or something of that ilk, I am generally going to like the book. Maybe I am arrogant and/or self-obsessed, I don't know, but from my perspective characters thus described are generally either very self-aware, intellectually confident and archly funny or self-deluded, intellectually confident, and interesting. Either way, its a good start for a good read. This is not a hard and fast rule, but one that works for me more often than it fails. This book is insightful, funny, informative, and relatable. Is the memoirist pompous? He is. Is he sometimes whiny? He is. But he is also, as the cliché states, a keen observer of the human condition. He gets to be the fly on the wall and let's us spy on behavior many of us don't see every day. He also allows us to glimpse his personal journey, warts and all. I briefly waited tables in college, but my interest and POV is more as a person who has for the past 30ish years eaten in a lot of restaurants. With that perspective, I mostly enjoyed this one. Though I see the authors plan to write professionally has not thus far lead to professional success, he has managed to crank out one book worth reading, and that is better than most writers accomplish.
    • 3/5
      Less an expose, like the famed Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Waiter Rant is more snapshots and vignettes taken from the life of a waiter in an upscale restaurant of New York. There are some chapters which cover the more salacious elements, such as the obligatory sex-under-the-table and spitting in the food, but mostly it focuses on the human aspects: the couple who could barely afford their Valentine's Day dinner, a woman who had a stroke while sitting at a table, the lonely tale of a woman succumbing to a desperate alcoholism.

      Throughout most of it, the Waiter himself remains human, showing deep interest and empathy; these are clearly people, not characters to be exploited. My only complaint is near the end, where he seems to become a tad more egotistical and a tad bit eye-rolling in his navel-gazing. While he does admit that his attitude suffered due to personal changes in his life, and the growing realization that being a waiter was failing to fulfill him as a person, it rings a tad hollow. He starts quoting Sartre casually in conversation, idly drawing comparisons to Philip Marlowe, and alternates between admitting that his relationships with the other staff have suffered and professing not to care. There is an almost defensiveness in his writing in the last few chapters, as if he were aware of his faults but desperately tried to excuse them - I hate to say it, but it is very easy to see how, if these were only what he chose to represent, he might very well have become insufferable to his colleagues.

      Still, overall, and especially in the first three-quarters of the book, he has a singular charm. His writing is sparse, but effective. This is not really a book about waiting in general, but of a man who is a waiter - unlike Bourdain's work, which felt universal, this definitely has a focus. It has a protagonist, the author himself, and follows his life. Being a waiter is certainly what he talks about most, but it's in relation to how it affected him. Again, less an expose, more snapshots from a man's life while he was a waiter.

      All in all, it was an enjoyable read, one which had an unexpected depth to it beyond laughing at absurdist stories of the underbelly of restaurants.
    • 3/5
      I expected this to be more of an expose than a bitch fest about how shitty being a waiter is. While there were some interesting vignettes, overall, it was kind of slow and negative.
    • 2/5
      This is a "tell-all" memoir from a psychologist turned waiter. There are some interesting back-room stories, but mostly it's page after page of complaints about customers, followed by gossip about how screwed up the other employees at the restaurant are, followed by his yearning to be a professional writer. This would have been better if he left the meta-content about writing the book out of it and focused more on his day to day exploits rather than bringing down his co-workers. For example, there's a section where he's describing how to get a bigger tip out of customers and he stops himself and says he can't give away all the secrets of a professional waiter. Why not? That's what I'm reading this book to find out! He hints at his after-work antics, but never gives a clear picture of his vices, so the ride is more more tame that I anticipated.
    • 3/5
      Interesting book. Would have liked more insider info on the restaurant business and less of the authors personal life.
    • 2/5
      How did I come to possess this book? Well, the combination of a Books-A-Million going out of business sale, my mistaken assumption that it would be a collection of essays written by various people who had once waited tables, and a cover blurb from Anthony Bourdain calling it "painfully funny" was apparently a heady combination that led to this bit of buyer's remorse. To be fair, this is not a bad book, nor is it a terribly interesting one. Alas, Waiter Rant is by one waiter who depends upon his anonymity as he blogs about his job while still in the trenches (he has since been revealed to be Steve Dublanica). Dublanica finds himself middle-aged and without steady employment, so takes a wait job as a stopgap between careers--and then never really leaves. The rest of the book follows his adventures and misadventures with the surly kitchen staff, incompetent wait staff, and the snooty, entitled patrons who can make a waiter's life a living hell. I assumed (based on the description and various blurbs) that all of this would be funny. Except it's not. By one-third of the way through, it failed to elicit a chuckle, a twitter, a smirk, or even one of those weird laughs that consist of basically blowing air out of your nose really hard when something catches you kind of off-guard and you're not sure if it's appropriate to laugh. And I like to think that I'm not humor impaired. I laugh and laugh often. The problem here is that being cynical is not the same as being funny. Now when funny and cynical come together with a dash of acerbic wit, it can be a beautiful and miraculous thing (I'm looking at you, Anthony Bourdain), but there's no magic here and I'm reading it because--once again, I'm looking at you Anthony Bourdain. The other reason it failed to entertain me is because its main message seems to be that people suck. And they do, I'll not argue against that. But waiters don't have the market cornered on I-don't-get-paid-enough-to-put-up-with-ungrateful-and-crazy-all-day-long. Anyone who has any job that requires contact with the public knows this spiel. I've been a waiter, a cashier, a secretary, a teacher and the dynamic is always the same--as long as there's a customer, someone's going to be an asshole because you're there to serve them and, by God, that means doing precisely what they want when they want it and if not then they will be talking to your supervisor. Having lived this, reading about it is not how I want to spend my hours away from work.Throughout, Dublanica comes across as some kind of super-waiter and, while I have no reason to doubt that he was good at his job and took it seriously, his stories fail to come to life as he seems incapable of portraying himself as flawed. He always seems to have the upper-hand and becomes the sage keeper of knowledge for the younger employees. It also makes the dining experience seem all about the waiter: what's best for the waiter, how to keep your waiter happy, tips that help make the waiter's job easier, etc. as though it's the customer's job to cater to the waiter. Now, as previously mentioned, I've been a waitress (briefly; as part of my training, I was seriously told to "kiss the babies and flirt with the old men"--homey don't play that game so apparently my "perkitude" wasn't up to their standards and I was unceremoniously fired). And, yes, people can treat waiters terribly and there are things one can and should do to make a dining experience pleasant for all involved. Most of those things involve simple human decency. But Dublanica makes it sound like such a one-sided affair that waiters should be leaving tips to customers who jump through all the hoops outlined in the book to make it a pleasure to serve them.While some of the information about the dynamic that exists among the employees in a restaurant is mildly interesting, there's nothing really surprising here. Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder
    • 4/5
      I'm attracted to work/career memoirs, particularly if they involve humorous stories about working with the public. I've never worked in the restaurant industry, but I still found Steve Dublanica's memoir to be fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying all at the same time.

      The book covers all sorts of stories, from his first time waiting tables to the time he served Russell Crowe, to the couple who threw a conniption fit because they couldn't get a "good" table in the back during the dinner hour. Dublanica has already classified himself as a cynic, but he spends a fair amount of time in the book analyzing why these customers (and other troublesome diners) behave the way they do. His conclusions point to an excess of narcissism and the prevalence of a culture based on instant gratification - a cynical and depressing perspective of the American population to be sure, but as Dublanica reminds us, 80% of the people coming into a restaurant only want to enjoy a good meal. It's the other 20% that are raving psychopaths incapable of functioning in the outside world.

      In addition, here's a lot of insider information about how restaurants are run, why so many restaurants collapse under subpar management, and how some corrupt owners use blackmail and general bullying to keep their pockets lined and their employees obedient. Makes me grateful that I've never worked in the food industry before...

      For anyone who works customer service or works with the public, there is a lot of relatable material in here, regardless of your profession. The only downside to this was that I tended to relate a little TOO much and found myself getting angry while reading this book. Not a pleasant sensation, but if Dublanica's intention was to make people care about what happens in the restaurant business, he succeeded tenfold.

      And as an added bonus, he includes a couple of appendices towards the end about how to be a good customer the next time you go out to eat. (For example, it's always best to ask for separate checks BEFORE the waiter takes your order. Otherwise it just creates an extra hassle at the end of the meal.)

      Recommended for: anyone in the food industry, anyone with an interest in work-related memoirs, anyone who has had to work customer service, anyone who likes their reading with a healthy dose of dry humor and cynicism.

      Readalikes:

      Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores - Jen Campbell. While this book focuses on the book industry instead of the food industry, and is a collection of small snippets from multiple book store employees as opposed to an actual memoir, it's absolutely hilarious and easy to relate to.

      Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet - Heather Poole. This memoir's combination of juicy gossip and eye-opening information gives readers an inside look at the world of a flight attendant.

      Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality - Jacob Tomsky. Just like Dublanica, Jacob Tomsky never INTENDED to work where he does, and now he has a huge list of stories that chronicle the highs and lows of working in the hospitality industry. Plus tips on how to get the most out of your hotel stay.
    • 4/5
      Loved it. Picked it up because a friend recommended after I finished Kitchen Confidential. I almost wish the appendices weren't included though. The narrative was fun, but they pushed it into bitchy.
    • 4/5
      Summary: Steve didn't ever imagine that he'd find himself starting out in the restaurant business waiting tables at the age of 31. He also didn't imagine himself starting an anonymous tell-all blog about the ups and downs of the life of a waiter, and he probably really didn't imagine that blog winning a bunch of writing awards, and eventually being parlayed into a book deal. But it did, and this is the book. Much like a front-of-the-house version of Kitchen Confidential, Waiter Rant provides a behind-the-scenes look at what's really going on among the servers of your favorite restaurants. Dublanica suggests that people let their guard down when they're eating, even when they're dining out, and the things that your waiter has seen and heard range from obnoxious to outrageous to truly touching. He also covers topics like tipping and why you should do it (and how waiters can recognize bad tippers long before the bill finally arrives), tensions between the owner and the employees and how that can affect the service, and why people become waiters in the first place, why they stay, and what can happen to them along the way.Review: This book was basically like literary candy for me. I mean, I loved Kitchen Confidential enough to convince me that I didn't hate memoirs as a genre, and I've read several other restaurant memoirs in the intervening years (Blood, Bones, and Butter, Heat and Service Included). Waiter Rant takes an approach that's more similar to Kitchen Confidential than the other two, in that while it is a memoir, and does have stories about the author's career path, and previous jobs, and personal life, and coworkers, and transition from waiting tables into writing books, etc., a lot of the book is much more general. Dublanica - who was anonymous while he was writing his blog, and prior to publication of this book - tells specific stories about things that happened to him, fights and flirtations with his coworkers, particular problematic customers, how things were at his restaurant, but he himself is only very rarely the focus of the story, and he always manages to bring it back around to a generalizable topic, a point that would be applicable to any waiter anywhere. I appreciated this, because that's what I was there to read (and fortunately, the parts that are more about the man than the job were also interesting, well-written, and mostly brief).A lot of what Dublanica says is common sense (or should be): be a reliable and generous tipper, don't try to snake a better table by pretending to be a friend of the owner (particularly if you're going to be belligerent about it), don't expect awesome service during Mother's Day brunch, etc. But he also reminded me of something that should have been obvious, but aren't necessarily - particularly just how much your waiter sees, hears, and notices. He doesn't talk a lot about the possibility of your server adulterating your food, but it turns out that there are other, subtler ways a waiter has to counter bad behavior of various kinds. (I will admit, I am now a little more self-conscious when dining out, not because I'm ever badly behaved, but because who knows which waiter is listening to and judging my conversation?) Overall, did I learn anything about the food service industry from this book that I hadn't already gleaned from other things I've read and seen? Not really. But that doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the heck out of myself while reading it. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Kitchen Confidential and its ilk of behind-the-scenes day-in-the-life type memoirs are the obvious readalikes.