Anyone who has worked in a restaurant knows what a roll-up is and I ain’t talking about the fruit kind. I’m talking about the silverware that gets “rolled up” into a napkin and placed lovingly on the table in your station. This is only a facet of your job if you work in a high class establishment that uses linen napkins and not some skanky cheap ass bitch place that uses paper napkins, also known as most of the places I have worked. Doing your roll-ups usually is a part of your sidework at the end of the day. I personally never minded doing them because you got to sit at a table in order to do it and what other sidework is there that lets you sit? It’s probably the last thing you do at the end of your shift and you just want that shit done so you can go home. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at a rack of sliver and figured that it was clean enough and rolled those bitches up into a napkin. Depending on the place, you have to roll a certain number of them to be considered finished. At Houlihan’s we had to do fifty. We had to roll them up and lay them in a row of five and then stack five more on top of that until we had a big stack of semi-clean silver ready for the dinner rush. Since we all hated doing it at the end of the day, we started getting into the habit of doing our fifty before the shift started and then hiding them somewhere so at the end of your shift all you had to do was pull the stack from the hiding place, show it to the shift manager and call it a day. This eventually turned into a problem. When we had six servers who all wanted to do their roll-ups in the morning and then hide them, it meant that we were short 300 roll-ups to put on the tables for lunch. Now I don’t know about your restaurant, but most of the time utensils are moderately important. So of course, that practice was put to a halt. Another thing we did to avoid the nuisance of rolling silver was to share the same stack. For instance, Jane, Randie, Corrine and I would together roll fifty. Jane would then take the stack to the manager to show him that she had rolled her necessary amount and he would give her the all clear. She would then bring the stack to Randie who would then go to a shift leader and show the same stack of fifty and also get the all clear. Then Corrinne would show the stack to a manager and then I would show it to the shift leader and then bolt the hell out of there because it would only be a matter of time before someone working the dinner shift would notice that instead of 200 roll-ups, there were only 50. That only worked for a few times before they caught on, but I think it was pretty fucking genius of us. Not to mention lazy.
The answer to this issue is clear. We should all use paper napkins and plastic utensils. Not only is it much easier for the servers, it is also cost efficient for the restaurant and also good for the environment. Okay, so maybe it’s a bit more expensive for the restaurant, but all they have to do is add twenty cents to the cost of a soda and it will blanace itself out. And maybe it’s not all that great for Planet Earth, but hey, we are talking about making life easier for servers and I think Mother Nature would want it that way.
a2a_linkname=”The Bitchy Waiter”;a2a_linkurl=”http://thebitchywaiter.blogspot.com”;
noxious sunshine
lol.. Passing it off to 4 other servers for show is a rookie mistake, sorry.
At best you can get away with doing the pass off to -1- other person. Keep switching it up with different servers and you’ll be able to do it on a regular basis.
At LongHorn, we had to roll an entire wooden box- which equals out to around 75 silverware. It just has to be full. That’s all.
So what we’d do is roll one row, then the next row, flip the silver around sideways, roll a few less for that row and continue on for every other row.. Leave the top 2 rows the way they’re supposed to be- all the same way or whatever.. No one ever knows the difference. Or. They do, but there’s no way to tell which server did it.
I didn’t mind rolling silverware. I’m fast at it. I’ll trade off rolling someone else’s if they’ll do my side work or let them pay me $5 to do their’s for them. I think I made off with a good $40 on a Friday night at Logan’s.. We had eleventy billion servers on the floor so it was slow. I was bored.
Anonymous
Well, to all of you. If the worst thing you have to do in life is roll silverware, you couldn't have it SO bad. I know someone who has MS and takes PRIDE in his job of rolling silverware. As of this month, his own record at a well known restaurant is 240…and you complain of rolling 50?…YOU ALL GET A LIFE.
Unknown
Fuck that. 90% of servers I've ever worked with just don't bother to work hard enough. That's in fine dining, shitty pizza joints and sit down family style dives all.Get faster and you'll stop worrying about silverware.
Anonymous
What restuarants still roll silverware?
Sarah
The place I work at now uses linens not paper, and we only have enough silver to have about 50 extra once all the tables are set up. SO we have to roll through out the night for our tables and at the end of the night. It sucks. But it is better to only roll 25-30 for your section at the end of the night then roll 100 to get through all of tomorrow's shift.
Serendipity
Yeah, we really were pretty damn ingenious!
Anonymous
They make fabu;ous looking plastic that looks just like silver. I say all restaurants should use it!
AZWaitress
This is why I don't mind paying the $3 per night for somebody else to roll silver. After doing my tables and BOH closing sidework, fuck rolling silver!
stiletto
We have a server rule where I work… if any silverware is on the germ-infested surface we call "the kitchen floor" by the end of the night, we sweep it up and throw it out. Less to roll and more sanitary for customers.
Paula
hahahahah Bitchy…i cant even add to that cuz you said it all….so so very very true
purplegirl
If there aren't visible chunks, it's good enough!If there are visible chunks … scrape 'em off. They've been through the sanitizer twice, they're sterile chunks!(Just kidding …. sort of.)