Hard Work

Being confined to a sweltering hot kitchen for hours at a time, only leaving to run right back, might not seem like an ideal job for everyone. However, that is exactly my duty as a food runner at the Gas Lamp Grille in Newport, Rhode Island.

Newport is a resort town packed with eateries of all sorts, and its food-service industry is extremely competitive at the very least. The restaurants that line the streets and wharfs take every aspect of the dining experience they provide very seriously, from the food to the service to the ambiance. Needless to say, my job as a food runner can be very hectic, especially on weekend nights in the summer when it is a process to even move around the tourists that pack the streets.

As a runner, my job is to organize the food that the cooks send out, make sure everything was made correctly, and carry the plates out to tables in a timely manner. On the surface, this does not seem too difficult, and it is true that on the less-busy nights at Gas Lamp it is a rather monotonous duty. However, the nights where I am faced with a packed restaurant and an hour-long wait are another story. The area to set the plates the cooks hand me and check them all over is no wider than my arm span, and can only fit about four plates, definitely an issue when there are about twelve dishes to send out to multiple different tables. When the cooks make a mistake on a busy night, it is a tragedy- I then need to find a means of keeping the other meals on the ticket hot while I wait for the last dish to be remade and sent out. Possibly the most stressful job as a food runner is bringing food to tables seated upstairs. Navigating the narrow dining room with a tray piled up with heavy, hot meals is an art form at Gas Lamp.

For some, a job this frantic might not be worth the relatively small paycheck. However, I soon learned the benefit of sticking to it even when I was so stressed that I wanted to run out of the front door- the tips. Thankfully, hard work did...