Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress
by Debra Ginsberg

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Book Reviews of Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress

Book Review: Not quite warm enough
Summary: 2 Stars

While the waitressing stories can oftentimes be quite funny, there is a curious lack of the personal touch among them. Strangely, I had to continually remind myself that these stories were not being told second-hand. The stories are not told about a friend of a friend, or nor are they manufactured, but are actually experiences from the author herself. Yet the viewpoint of the author makes them feel as though they happened to somebody else -- a somebody else who isn't particularly close to the author. The consequence of this is that the stories feel remote and cold. Rather than drawing us into her confidence, Ginsberg keeps us at arm's length. Even more telling is that the author seems trapped between wanting to share some of her personal life with the reader and not wanting to go into any significant detail. The result is that the memoir seems like neither one thing nor the other, with minor and random facts about herself and her family being thrown into the general whitewash of the rest of the story.

I did enjoy reading the first hundred or so pages. However, after a certain point, I realized that the book wasn't going to get any more introspective and that the faintly hollow feeling that I experienced from the beginning was going to be present throughout the entire book. For a three hundred page memoir, this is not something that is going to work well. Had the book been about half its current length, the lack of depth might not have been as significant a flaw, but to maintain reader interest for that entire length, we really need more interesting material to read about. The message of this book seems to be that waiters and waitresses are real people with real problems, and sometimes whether or not a customer's lasagna is the optimal temperature isn't the most important thing on his or her mind. This is indeed an important message, but hardly an Earth-shattering one. If you are among the few people on the planet who hasn't already realized this fairly simple fact, then not only should you educate yourself with this book, but you must go out immediately, track down every waiter you've ever been rude to, get down on your knees, and apologize profusely. Everyone else can continue to tip well, but can probably skip this book, as apparently they innately understand what Ginsberg goes to a lot of trouble to explain.

Now I don't want to be wholly negative in this review, as there were several anecdotes and stories that I found to be quite amusing. Yes, funny things can happen in restaurants and there are a number of entertaining stories to be read. Some of the accounts here, while occasionally repetitive, are sufficiently distracting enough to be enjoyable. Many of them will have you cringing at the amount of human stupidity displayed by numerous customers of restaurants all across America. A handful of Ginsberg's fellow co-workers occasionally stand out, and it's a pity that we never get to know more than a scattering of details about any of them. I get the impression that there were a lot of great stories concerning these people that we never really got the chance to read about.

Unfortunately, I can't say that WAITING is a fantastic memoir. If your reaction to the revelation of waiters and waitresses being actual (and overworked) human beings is to say, "Yeah, I knew that already," then this book will most likely be a rethread of what you understand to be true anyway. Maybe it's an inherent property of waitressing that most of the things one learns about people are done so within a short amount of time, leaving little room for deeper thoughts or meaningful reflections. But these short musings aren't enough to sustain the entire book. WAITING is only recommended if you genuinely have no idea that waiters are people.

Summary of Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress

A veteran waitress dishes up a spicy and robust account of life as it really exists behind kitchen doors.

Part memoir, part social commentary, part guide to how to behave when dining out, Debra Ginsberg's book takes readers on her twentyyear journey as a waitress at a soap-operatic Italian restaurant, an exclusive five-star dining club, the dingiest of diners, and more. While chronicling her evolution as a writer, Ginsberg takes a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant life-revealing that yes, when pushed, a server will spit in food, and, no, that's not really decaf you're getting-and how most people in this business are in a constant state of waiting to do something else.

Women Books

• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Women
• Cookbooks, Food & Wine
• Humor & Entertainment > Humor
• Travel > Reference & Tips > Food & Lodging