9PM Is The Best Time To Arrive — And More From A Friend At Fanelli

Friends In Service is a monthly column that features friends who work at restaurants. From the manager at Le Dive to the server you always see at Lovely Day, to the girl behind the bar at The River, every friend is someone to know (and has stories worth knowing).

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A lot can be said of sceney downtown restaurants—the waitlists snaking into the sunset, the glitzy outfits donned by taste-making svengalis sizing each other up, the prices that leave you feeling used and abused—still, they’re lovable. To be a waitress is to know too much. You are pegged as an ally, the pert liaison between hunger and fullness, and often, a confidant. On a Monday eve, after an arugula salad and no wine, in an even keel, a poet I had admired for years confessed to me her husband was a cunt and she was finally filing for divorce.

It was summer, the restaurant was popular and we worked with an ensemble of girls. A customer once told me that we were like a shitty band. A part-time regular who tipped well, he struck me as someone who might spend a Monday making artisan chocolate out of his apartment above Berlin—not the city but the place where the bartender warns you that the frozen margaritas are extra strong (read: just one will have you in that apartment, eating those artisan chocolates). He had a point. We’d close early in the morning, pull the grate down, and drink on the sidewalk with our lackluster groupies: the lingering customers who didn’t get the memo when we played “Closing Time” over the speakers. She, like many waitresses I know, possess a cool charisma and a blinding pull towards a career in the arts. Often they moonlight as servers, but many of them are wolves in sheep’s clothing.