Mother’s Day…
I’m currently a sommelier but until February of last year I had been serving for a long time.
Tonight was an absolute shit show. I work at a nice upscale place, not quite fine dining but close. It’s in a trendy area of NYC, and we are the flagship restaurant for my hospitality group.
We were understaffed and I honestly feel embarrassed about the service we provided tonight.
For a lot of these moms this was probably the one gift they were getting from their family: a nice meal out. And it felt like we had a hand tied behind our backs being understaffed.
They’ve been doing this staggered in time thing, to save on labor costs. So for the first 30-40mins of service most of the servers were on break. So it was me (the somm) and the two new managers taking tables, while also grabbing bottles for tables and doing my somm thing. It was a lot.
And of course because it’s Mother’s Day, the first turn at 5pm is the busiest! Last week I warned upper management that they should staff today differently because of this, and they didn’t listen.
On top of it all, the kitchen wasn’t keeping up and ticket times for entrees were like 45mins-1hr. And because as a somm, I’m dressed like a manger in a blazer, every table was flagging me down to complain (I may be dressed nice, but I’m an hourly employee and in the tip pool at the same exact rate as the servers).
I was a somm, server and manager lite tonight and it just sucked. These moms deserved a better night out, and I feel crappy that I couldn’t make it happen.