Chapter 3: Expanding Notions of Literate Practice

R E A DI NG

Learning to Serve:
The Language and Literacy of Food
Service Workers

P
Tony Mirabelli
Tony Mirabelli is a Tutorial Coordinator at University of California-Berkeley,
wherein 2001, he earned his PhD in Education in Language, Literacy and
Culture. His article, Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service
Workers, examines the literacy practices involved in restaurant work in many of
the same ways Moss looked at the African-American church. Like Moss, Mirabelli
had extensive personal experience with these literacy events and practices as they
manifest themselves in the contexts he investigates. The following article examines
an Italian-American restaurant where he worked as a waiter for two years.
BEFORE YOU READ the following essay, read yourself.
1. What sorts of literacy events and practices do you understand to
be a regular part of food service work? Have you ever worked in a
restaurant? If not, the time youve spent in one or more restaurants will
help you answer these questions. Make use of that knowledge. Might
the literacy practices required of workers in what Mirabelli calls Diner
restaurants differ from those required of fast-food service workers?
How? What literacy practices and events are involved with a restaurant
you know particularly well? What kinds of texts can be found? How
are they used? What literacy events surround their use?
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2. According to the following essay, how language is spoken, read, or

written in a restaurant may be vastly different from how it is used in a
classroom. . . . How the waitress or waiter understands and uses texts
such as the menu and how she or he reads and verbally interacts with
the customer reflect carefully constructed uses of language and literacy
(145). What does he mean by this? Do you agree? Why or why not?

Bitterwaitress.com is one of the newest among a burgeoning number of workerproduced websites associated with the service industry.1 The menu on the first page
of this website offers links to gossip about celebrity behavior in restaurants, gossip
about chefs and restaurant owners, accounts from famous people who were once
waitresses,2 and customer-related horror stories. There is also a forum that includes
a hate mail page that posts email criticisms of the website itself, as well as general
criticisms of waitressing, but the criticisms are followed by rebuttals usually from
past or present waitresses. Predictably, most of the criticisms either implicitly or
explicitly portray waitresses as ignorant and stupid. One email respondent didnt
like what he read on the customer horror story page and sent in this response:
If you find your job [as a waitress] so despicable, then go get an education and
get a REAL job. You are whining about something that you can fix. Stop being
such a weakling, go out and learn something, anything, and go make a real
contribution to society.Wait, let me guess: you do not have any marketable
skills or useful knowledge, so you do what any bumbling fool can do, wait on
tables. This is your own fault.
This response inspired a number of rebuttals of which the following two best
summarize the overall sentiment expressed in response to the rant above. The first
is from the webmaster of bitterwaitress.com:
Is it possible that I have an education, maybe I went to, oh say, Duke, and I
just waitressed for some free time? Or that there are very many people in the
industry who do this so that they CAN get an education? Not all of us were born
with a trust fund.There is, I might add, considerably more or less to a job than

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a clear cut salary. If youlive in New York,youll know that empty stores
and un-crowded subways are half the reason to work at night. By the way, what
are the three Leovilles? What are the two kinds of tripe? Who was Cesar Ritz
partner? What is the JavaScript for a rollover? I guess I would have to ask a
bumbling fool those questions. So, tell me then.
The second is from a mother of four:
I might not have a college education, but I would love to see those so called
intelligent people get a big tip out of a bad meal, or from a person who is rude
and cocky just because thats the way they arethat takes talent and its not a
talent you can learn at any university. So, think about it before you say, poor
girlto dumb to get a real job.
Assumptions that waitresses (and waiters) are ignorant and stupid and
that waiting on tables contributes little to society are not new. The rebuttals to
commonplace, pejorative understandings of the food service industry suggest,
however, that there is complexity and skill that may go unrecognized by the
general public or institutions such as universities. Indeed institutions, particularly
government and corporate entities in the United States, like the Bureau of Labor
Statistics or the National Skills Labor Board, define waiting on tables as a low
skilled profession. By defining this kind of work as low skilled, there is a concomitant
implication that the more than one-third of Americas work force who do it are
low skilled.
Service occupations, otherwise known as in-person services (Reich, 1992)
or interactive services (Leidner, 1993; MacDonald and Sirianni, 1996), include
any kind of work which fundamentally involves face-to-face or voice-to-voice
interactions and conscious manipulation of self-presentation. As distinguished from
white-collar service work, this category of emotional proletariat (MacDonald and
Sirianni, 1996) is comprised primarily of retail sales workers, hotel workers, cashiers,
house cleaners, flight attendants, taxi drivers, package delivery drivers, and waiters,
among others. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1996), one-fifth
of the jobs in eating, drinking, and grocery store establishments are held by youth
workers between the ages of 16 and 24. While this kind of work is traditionally
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assumed to be primarily a stop-gap for young workers who will later move up and
on to other careers, it also involves youths who will later end up in both middle- and
working-class careers. It should not be forgotten that more than two thirds of the
workers involved in food service are mature adultsmany or most who began their
careers in the same or similar industries. Interactive service work is a significant
part of the economy in the U.S. today, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts
that jobs will be abundant in this category through 2006.
Economists such as Peter Drucker (1993) suggest that interactive service
workers lack the necessary education to be knowledge workers. These economists
support general conceptions that service work is mindless, involving routine and
repetitive tasks that require little education. This orientation further suggests that
these supposedly low skilled workers lack the problem identifying, problem solving,
and other high level abilities needed to work in other occupations. However,
relatively little specific attention and analysis have been give to the literacy skills
and language abilities needed to do this work. My research investigates these issues
with a focus on waiters and waitresses who work in diners. Diner restaurants are
somewhat distinct from fast food or fine-dining restaurants, and they also epitomize
many of the assumptions held about low skilled workplaces that require interactive
services. The National Skills Standard Board, for instance, has determined that a
ninth-grade level of spoken and written language use is needed to be a waiter or a
waitress. Yet, how language is spoken, read, or written in a restaurant may be vastly
different from how it is used in a classroom. A seemingly simple event such as
taking a customers food order can become significantly more complex, for example,
when a customer has a special request. How the waitress or waiter understands and
uses texts such as the menu and how she or he reads and verbally interacts with
the customer reflect carefully constructed uses of language and literacy.
This chapter explores these constructed ways of reading texts (and customers)
along with the verbal performances and other manipulations of self-presentation
that characterize interactive service work. In line with MacDonald and Sirianni
(1996), I hope this work will contribute to the development of understandings and
policies that build more respect and recognition for service work to help ensure it
does not become equated with servitude.

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Literacy And Contemporary Theory

In contrast to institutional assessments such as the National Skills Standards
Board (1995), current thinking in key areas of education, sociology, anthropology
and linguistics views language, literacy, and learning as embedded in social practice
rather than entirely in the minds of individuals (Street, 1984; Gee, 1991; Lave and
Wenger, 1991; Kress, 1993; Mahiri and Sablo, 1996; New London Group, 1996;
Gee, Hull, and Lankshear, 1996). As earlier chapters in this book have noted, Gee
(1991: 6)a key proponent of this conception of literacyexplains that to be
literate means to have control of a socially accepted association among ways of
using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as
a member of a socially meaningful group or social network. In a similar fashion,
research work located explicitly within workplace studies proposes that literacy is
a range of practices specific to groups and individuals of different cultures, races,
classes and genders (Hull et al., 1996: 5).
In most societal institution, however, literacy, continues to be defined by
considerations of achievement and by abstract, standardized tests of individual
students. Also, there is a decided focus on printed texts over other mediums of
communication like visual and audio. Such a focus limits our understanding of
literacy in terms of its use in specific situations in multiple modes of communication.
The New Literacy Studies orientation that shapes the work reported in this book
argues that literacy extends beyond individual experiences of reading and writing
to include the various modes of communication and situations of any socially
meaningful group or network where language is used in multiple ways. The New
London Group (1996), for example, claims that due to changes in the social and
economic environment, schools too must begin to consider language and literacy
education in terms of multiliteracies. The concept of multiliteracies supplements
traditional literacy pedagogy by addressing the multiplicity of communications
channels and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity in the world
today. Central to this study is the understanding that literate acts are embedded in
specific situations and that they also extend beyond the printed text involving other
modes of communication including both verbal and nonverbal. In this chapter, I
illustrate something of the character of literacies specific to the social network of
waiting on tables and show how they are distinct from the conceptions of literacy
commonly associated with formal education. This is not simply to suggest that
there is a jargon specific to the work, which of course there is, but that there is

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something unique and complex about the ways waiters and waitresses in diners use
language and literacy in doing their work.

Methodology
Taken together, extant New Literacies Studies research makes a formidable
argument for the need to re-evaluate how we understand literacy in the
workplaceparticularly from the perspective of interactive service workers. The
research reported here is modeled after Hull and her colleagues groundbreaking
ethnographic study of skill requirements in the factories of two different Silicon
Valley computer manufacturing plants (1996). Instead of studying manufacturing
plants, the larger research study I conducted and that underpins the study reported
here involves two diner restaurantsone that is corporately owned and one that is
privately owned. In this chapter, however, I focus only on the one that is privately
owned to begin addressing the specific ways that language use and literacy practices
function in this kind of workplace.
To analyze the data, I relied on some of the methodological tools from the
work of Hull and her colleagues (1996). In short, I looked at patterns of thought
and behavior in the setting; I identified key events taking place; I did conversational
analysis of verbal interactions; and, I conducted sociocultural analyses of key work
events.
The data used in this chapter came from direct participation, observation, field
notes, documents, interviews, tape recordings, and transcriptions, as well as from
historical and bibliographic literature. I myself have been a waiter (both part-time
and full-time over a ten-year period), and I was actually employed at the privately
owned restaurant during my data collection period. In addition to providing
important insights into worker skills, attitudes, and behaviors, my experience and
positioning in this setting also enabled access to unique aspects of the work that
might have otherwise gone unnoticed. The primary data considered in this chapter
were collected during eight-hour periods of participant observation on Friday and/
or Saturday nights in the restaurant. I chose weekend nights because they were
usually the busiest times in the diner and were therefore the most challenging for
the workers. Weekend shifts are also the most lucrative for the restaurant and the
workers.

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Lous Restaurant
Lous Restaurant3 is a modest, privately owned diner restaurant patterned in a
style that is popular in the local region. It has an open kitchen layout with a counter
where individual customers can come and sit directly in front of the cooks line
and watch the drama of food service unfold while enjoying their meals. The food
served at Lous is Italian-American and it includes pastas, seafood, and a variety of
sauted or broiled poultry, beef, and veal. As is often the case with diner restaurants,
Lous has over ninety main course items, including several kinds of appetizers and
salads, as well as a number of side dishes. The primary participants focused on in
this chapter are three waiters at Lous: John, Harvey, and myself.
After finishing my masters degree in English literature and deciding to move
out of the state where I taught English as a Second Language at a community
college, I ended up working as a waiter for two years at Lous. This work allowed
me to survive financially while further advancing my academic career. At the time I
began my study at this site, the only waiter to have worked longer than two years at
Lous was John. Like myself, John began working in the restaurant business to earn
extra money while in school after he had been discharged from the Marines, where
he had been trained as a radio operator, telephone wireman, and Arabic translator.
Two days after his honorable discharge, he started working in the restaurant that
four years later would become Lous. He subsequently has worked there for ten
years. John also is the most experienced waiter at Lous, and although the restaurant
does not have an official head waiter, John is considered by his peers to be the
expert. In an interview, he noted that it took almost ten years before he felt that he
had really begun to master his craft.
Harvey might also be considered a master waiter, having been in the profession
for over thirty years. However, at the beginning of the study he had been with Lous
for only two weeks. He was initially reticent to participate in the study because he
said he lacked experience at this restaurant, and didnt know the menu. Having
left home when he was 14 years old to come out West, over the years he had done
a stint in the Air Force, held a position as a postal clerk, worked as a bellhop and
bartender, and even had the opportunity to manage a local caf. He decided that
he did not like managerial work because he missed the freedom, autonomy, and
customer interaction he had as a waiter and took a position at Lous.

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The Menu
Harveys concern over not knowing the menu was not surprising. The menu is
the most important printed text used by waiters and waitresses, and not knowing it
can dramatically affect how they are able to do their work. The menu is the key text
used for most interactions with the customer, and, of course, the contents of menus
vary greatly from restaurant to restaurant. But, what is a menu and what does it
mean to have a literate understanding of one?
The restaurant menu is a genre unto itself. There is regularity and predictability
in the conventions used such as the listing, categorizing, and pricing of individual,
ready-made food items. The menu at Lous contains ninety main course items, as
well as a variety of soups, salads, appetizers, and side dishes. In addition, there are
numerous selections where, for example, many main course items offer customers
a choice of their own starch item from a selection of four: spaghetti, ravioli, french
fries, or a baked potato. Some of the main course items, such as sandwiches,
however, only come with french friesbut if the customer prefers something such
as spaghetti, or vegetables instead of fries, they can substitute another item for a
small charge, although this service is not listed in the menu. In addition to the
food menu, there is also a wine menu and a full service bar meaning that hard
liquor is sold in this restaurant. There are twenty different kinds of wine sold by the
glass and a selection of thirty-eight different kinds of wine sold by the bottle, and
customers can order most other kinds of alcoholic beverages.
In one context, waitresses and waiters knowing the meaning of the words in
the menus means knowing the process of food production in the restaurant. But
this meaning is generally only used when a customer has a question or special
request. In such situations the meaning of the words on the page are defined
more by the questions and the waiters or waitresses understanding of specific
food preparation than by any standard cookbook or dictionary. For example, the
Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book (1996) presents a recipe for marinara
sauce calling for a thick sauce all sauted and simmered for over thirty minutes.
At Lous, a marinara sauce is cooked in less than ten minutes and is a light tomato
sauce consisting of fresh tomatoes, garlic, and parsley sauted in olive oil. At a
similar restaurant nearbyJoes Italian Dinermarinara sauce is a seafood sauce,
albeit tomato based. Someone who is familiar with Italian cooking will know that
marinara sauce will have ingredients like tomatoes, olive oil, and garlic, but, in a
restaurant, to have a more complete understanding of a work like marinara requires
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knowing how the kitchen prepares the dish. Clearly, the meanings of the language
used in menus are socially and culturally embedded in the context of the specific
situation or restaurant. To be literate here requires something other than a ninthgrade level of literacy. More than just a factual, or literal interpretation of the words
on the page, it requires knowledge of specific practicessuch as methods of food
preparationthat take place in a particular restaurant.
On one occasion Harvey, the new but experienced waiter, asked me what pesto
sauce was. He said that he had never come across the term before, and explained
that he had never worked in an Italian restaurant and rarely eaten in one. Pesto is
one of the standard sauces on the menu, and like marinara, is commonly found on
the menus of many Italian-American restaurants. I explained that it comprised
primarily olive oil and basil, as well as garlic, pine nuts, Parmesan cheese, and a
little cream. Harvey then told me that a customer had asked him about the sauce,
and since he could not explain what it was, the customer did not order it.
On another occasion a mother asked Harvey if her child could have only
carrots instead of the mixed vegetables as it said in the menu. Although he initially
told her this was not possible, explaining that the vegetables were premixed and
that the cooks would have to pick the carrots out one by one, the mother persisted.
After a few trips from the table to the cooks line, Harvey managed to get the
carrots, but the customer then declined them because everyone had finished eating.
Later, I explained to Harvey that it would have been possible to go to the back of
the restaurant where he could find the vegetables in various stages of preparation.
While the cooks only have supplies of pre-mixed vegetables on the line, Harvey
could have gone to the walk-in refrigerator and picked up an order of carrots
himself to give to the cooks.
Harveys interactions with his customers highlight how much of what he needs
to know to be a good waiter is learned within the specific situations and social
networks in which that knowledge is used. The instantiation of the meaning of
words like pesto and marinara often occurs in the interaction between co-workers
as well as with customers. Conversation becomes a necessary element in achieving
an appropriately literate understanding of the menu.
Harveys understanding and use of the menu and special requests also involves
more than his knowledge of food preparation. It involves the manipulation of
power and control. Sociocultural theories of literacy consider the role of power
and authority in the construction of meaning (Kress, 1993). From his perspective,
the order of carrots was not simply an order of carrots, but a way of positioning
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ones self in the interaction. The customer saw her desire for the carrots as greater
than what was advertised in the menu and thus exercised authority as a customer
by requesting them despite Harveys attempt to not make the carrots an option.
While such a request might seem fairly innocuous in isolation, when considered in
the specific situation of Lous at that timethat is, peak dinner hourit becomes
more complex.
Special requests and questions can extend the meaning of the menu beyond
the printed page and into the conversation and interaction between the waiter
or waitress and the customer. Furthermore, special requests and questions can
be as varied as the individual customers themselves. The general public shares a
diner restaurant menu, but it is used by each individual patron to satisfy a private
appetite. How to describe something to an individual customer and satisfy their
private appetite requires not only the ability to read the menu, but also the ability to
read the customer. This is achieved during the process of the dinner interaction, and
it includes linguistic events such as greeting the customer or taking food orders and
involves both verbal and non-verbal communication. In such events the meaning
of the menu is continually reconstructed in the interaction between the waitress or
waiter and the individual customer, and as a text functions as a boundary object
that coordinates the perspectives of various constituencies for a similar purpose
(Star and Griesmer, 1989); in this case the satisfaction of the individual patrons
appetite. The degree to which private appetite is truly satisfied is open to debate,
however. Virtually everyone who has eaten at a restaurant has his or her favorite
horror story about the food and/or the service, and more often than not these
stories in some way involve the menu and an unfulfilled private appetite.
In addition to being a text that is shared by the general public and used by
the individual patron to satisfy a private appetite, the menu is also a text whose
production of meaning results in ready-made consumable goods sold for profit. The
authors of a printed menu, usually the chefs and owners of the restaurant, have their
own intentions when producing the hard copy. For example, it is common practice
to write long extensively itemized menus in diner restaurants like Lous. As was
pointed out earlier, Lous menu has over ninety selections from which to choose,
and many of these can be combined with a range of additional possible choices.
Printing a large selection of food items gives the appearance that the customer will
be able to make a personaland personalizedselection from the extensive menu.
In fact, it is not uncommon for patrons at Lous to request extra time to read the
menu, or ask for recommendations before making a choice. The authors of the

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printed menu at Lous constructed a text that appears to be able to satisfy private
appetites, but they ultimately have little control over how the patron will interpret
and use the menu.
The waiters and waitresses, however, do have some control. While customers
certainly have their own intentions when asking questions, waitresses and waiters
have their own intentions when responding. When customers ask questions about
the menu, in addition to exercising their own authority, they also introduce the
opportunity for waiters and waitresses to gain control of the interaction. A good
example of how this control could be manipulated by a waiter or waitress comes
from Chris Fehlinger, the web-master of bitterwaitress.com, in an interview with
New Yorker magazine:
A lot of times when people asked about the menu, I would make it sound so
elaborate that they would just leave it up tome, he said, Id describe, like, three
dishes in excruciating detail, and they would just stutter, I, I, I cant decide, you
decide for me. So in that case, if the kitchen wants to sell fish, youre gonna have
fish. He also employed what might be called a magic words strategy: All you
have to do is throw out certain terms, like guanciale, and then you throw in
something like saba, a reduction of the unfermented must of the Trebbiano grape.
If you mention things like that, people are just, like, O.K.! (Teicholz, 1999)
The use of linguistic devices like obfuscating descriptions and magic words
is not unusualparticularly for waiters in fine dining restaurants. In The World of
the Waiters (1983), Mars and Nicod examined how English waiters use devices to
get the jump and gain control of selecting items from the menu. Their position
of authority is further substantiated in fine dining restaurants by the common
practice of printing menus in foreign languages, such as French, because it shifts the
responsibility of food ordering from the customer, who often will not understand
the language, to the waiter.
While diner restaurants generally do not print their menus in incomprehensible
terms, they do, as at Lous, tend to produce unusually long ones that can have a
similar effect. But, diner menus like Lous which offer Italian-American cuisine
do use some language that is potentially unfamiliar to the clientele (e.g., pesto). The
combination of menu length and potentially confusing language creates frequent
opportunities for waiters and waitresses to get a jump on the customer. Customers
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at Lous tend to ask questions about the meaning of almost every word and phrase
in the menu. Not being able to provide at least a basic description of a menu item,
as shown by Harveys unfamiliarity with pesto, usually results in that item not
being ordered.
Knowing what a customer wants often goes beyond simply being able to
describe the food. It also involves knowing which descriptions will more likely sell
and requires being able to apply the menu to the specific situation. For instance,
in the following transcription I approach a table to take a food order while one
customer is still reading the menu (Customer 3b). She asks me to explain the
difference between veal scaloppini and veal scaloppini sec.
Tony:

(to Customer 3a and Customer 3b) hi

Customer 3b:

whats the difference between scaloppini and scaloppini sec?

Tony:

veal scaloppini is a tomato based sauce with green onions and

mushrooms / veal scaloppini sec is with marsala wine green onions
and mushrooms

Customer 3b:

Ill have the veal scaloppini sec.

Tony

ok / would you like it with spaghetti / ravioli / french fries

Customer 3b:

ravioli

Customer 3a:

and / Ill get the tomato one / the veal scaloppini with
mushrooms

Tony:

with spaghetti / ravioli / french fries

Customer 3a:

can I get steamed vegetables

Tony

you want vegetables and no starch? / it already comes with

vegetables / (.) (Customer 3a nods yes) ok / great / thank you

Customer 3a:

thanks

The word sec functions not unlike one of Fehlingers magic words. Customers
who are interested in ordering veal frequently ask questions about the distinctions
between the two kinds of scaloppini. I discovered over time that my description of
the veal scaloppini sec almost always resulted in the customer ordering the dish. It
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seemed that mentioning marsala wine piqued customer interest more than tomato
sauce did. One customer once quipped that marsala is a sweet wine and wanted
to know why the word secmeaning drywas used. I replied that since no fat
was used in the cooking process, it was considered dry cooking. In situations
like this the menu is situated more in a conversational mode than a printed one.
The transition from print to spoken word occurs due to the customers inability to
understand the menu, and/or satisfy his or her private appetite which results in a
request for assistance. As a result the waiter or waitress can become the authority in
relation to not only the printed text, but within the interaction as well. Eventually,
I began to recommend this dish when customers asked for one, and the customers
more often than not purchased it.
This particular food-ordering event also is interesting with regard to the
customers request for steamed vegetables. When I asked what kind of pasta she
would like with her meal, she asked for steamed vegetables. The menu clearly states
that vegetables are included with the meal along with the customers choice of
spaghetti, ravioli, or french fries. When she requested steamed vegetables, I simply
could have arranged for her to have them and persisted in asking her which past
she would like, but instead I anticipated that she might not want any pasta at
all. I knew that, while it was not printed on the menu, the kitchen could serve
her a double portion of steamed vegetables with no pasta. Most importantly, this
customers ability to order food that would satisfy her private appetite depended
almost entirely upon my suggestions and understanding of the menu. Mars and
Nicod (1984: 82), discussing a situation in a similar restaurant noted a waiter who
would say, You dont really need a menuIm a walking menu and Im much
better than the ordinary kindI can tell you things you wont find on the menu.
Examples like this illustrate not only how waitresses and waiters gain control of
their interactions with customers, but also how other modes of communication
such as conversationsare used to construct complex forms of meaning around
printed texts like menus. Thus, the meaning of words in a menu are embedded
in the situation, its participants, and the balance of power and authority, and this
meaning manifests itself in more than one mode of communication.
Reading menus and reading customers also involves a myriad of cultural
distinctions. Although there is not the space to discuss them here, age, gender, race,
and class are all relevant to interactions between customers and waiter or waitress.
The argument can be made that diner restaurants like Lous promote a friendly,
family-like atmosphere. Historically diners in the U.S. have been recognized as

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being places where customers can find a familial environment. Popular media today
support this characteristicparticularly via televisionwhere restaurant chains
explicitly advertise that their customers are treated like family, and a number of
television situation comedies have long used restaurants, diners, bars, and cafs as
settings where customers and employees interact in very personal and intimate ways.
This cultural atmosphere can have a tremendous impact on interactions with the
customers. There is sometimes miscommunication or resistance where a customer
may or may not want to be treated like family, or the waitress or waiter may or may
not want to treat a customer like family. At Lous, in addition to having an intimate
understanding of food production and being able to describe it to a customer in an
appealing fashion, reading a menu and taking a customers food order also requires
the ability to perform these tasks in a friendly, familial manner.
The following example reveals the complexity of meanings involved in taking a
customers food order and the expression of family. Al is a regular customer who
almost always comes in by himself and sits at the counter in front of the cooks
line. He also always has the same thing to eat, a side order of spaghetti Marinara,
and never looks at the menu. Perhaps more important to Al than the food he eats
are the people he interacts with at Lous. He will sit at the counter and enjoy the
badinage he shares with the other customers who sit down next to him at the
counter, the waitresses and waiters as they pass by his seat, and the cooks working
just across the counter. On this particular evening, however, he was joined by his
son, daughter-in-law, and young adult granddaughter, and rather than sitting at the
counter, he sat in a large booth. Although I immediately recognized Al, I had never
waited on him and his family before, I was not sure how informal he would like the
interaction to be. So I began with a fairly formal greeting saying hello instead of
hi and avoided opportunities to make small talk with Al and his family:
Tony:

hello::=

Customer 2d:

=hello

Al:

hey(.) what they put in the water? / I dont know / is it the ice or
what is it?

Customer 2s:

(chuckles from Customer 2d, Customer 2s and Customer 2c)

Tony:

does the water taste strange?

Customer 2s:

no
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Tony

do you want me to get you another water?

Al

no / I dont want any water

Tony:

ok

Al:

I had a couple of drinks before I came

Customer 2s:

(chuckles)=

Tony:

(in reference to the water tasting strange) =it could be / it could be

/ I dont know

Customer 2d:

(to Customer 2s) are you having anything to drink?

Customer 2s:

Ill have a beer / American beer / you have miller draft?

Tony:

(while writing down the order) miller genuine

Customer 2d:

and Ill have a tequila sunrise

Al:

(to Customer 2d) what are you having?

Customer 2d:

tequila sunrise

Al:

oh / you should fly / you should fly

Tony:

(to Customer 2a) al / you want anything?

Customer 2s:

(to Customer 2a) a beer? / or anything?

Al:

no / Ive had too much already

Customer 2s:

are you sure

Customer 2d:

well get you a coffee later

Tony:

(nod of affirmation to daughter-in-law)

Al:

Ive been home alone drinking

Tony:

ugh ogh:: / (chuckles along with Customer 2s)

Als comment about the water tasting funny and his drinking at home alone
both provided opportunities for me to interact more intimately with Al and his
family, but instead I concerned myself solely with taking their drink orders. Als
desire for me to interact in a more familial manner became more apparent when I
returned to take their food order.
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Customer 2d:

(as the drinks are delivered) ah / great / thank you

Tony: (placing drinks in front of customers) there you go / youre welcome

Al: (to Customer 2s) so were flying to vegas (mumbles)
Tony: all right / you need a few minutes here?
Customer 2s:

no / (to customer 2a) are you ready or do you want to wait?

Customer 2d:

you made up your mind yet?

Al: (mumble) made up my mind yet

Customer 2d:

oh / ok

Tony: al / what can I get for you?

Al: I said I havent made up my mind yet
Tony: oh / ok (everyone at the table chuckles except Al)
Al: I always have pasta you know / I would walk out there (points to the counter)
the guy says / I know what you want
Tony: ok / Ill be back in a few minutes
Customer 2d:

come back in a few minutes / thanks

While I misunderstood Al when I asked if he was ready to order, for him the
greater transgression was simply asking if he was ready to order. Al expected me to
know what he was going to eat because hes a regular; hes like family. He wanted
a side order of spaghetti marinara and didnt want to have to speak regarding his
food order. To be successful in fulfilling Als private appetite required more than
the ability to describe food according to individual customer preferences. A side
order of spaghetti marinara represents not merely a food item on a menu, nor a
satisfying mix of pasta and tomatoes, but also, depending on the way it is ordered
and served, a gesture of friendliness: I always have pasta you know / I would walk
out there (points to the counter) the guy says / I know what you want. To be
literate with a menu also means knowing when and how to express emotion (or not
express emotion) to a customer through its use.
Being able to take a customers order without him or her reading the menu
are important ways of expressing friendliness and family at Lous. John, the

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most experienced waiter on staff, often can be found running to get an order of
homemade gnocchi from the back freezer and delivering them to the cooks when
they are too busy to get back there themselves. Or, he might step in behind the bar
to make his own cappuccino when the bartender is busy serving other customers.
On one occasion, like many others, John had a customer request a special order
called prawns romano, a pasta dish consisting of fettuccine with prawns in a white
sauce with green onions, tomatoes, and garlic. This is not listed on any menu in the
restaurant, but it is something that the cooks occasionally offer as an evening special.
John politely asked whether or not the cooks could accommodate his customers
request, and they complied. One can frequently hear John greeting many of his
customers with some variation of, Can I get you the usual? Alternatively, in the
case of special requests, some variant of, Thats no problem is an often used phrase.
Just like a friend for whom it would be no problem, John attempts to satisfy his
customers special requests in a similar fashion.
Yet, friendliness is often a feigned performance. Being friendly is an
experiential phenomenon that is learned through participation. To be a good
waitress or waiter generally requires being able to perform friendliness under any
number of circumstances. To be successful at the practice of being friendly requires
performing certain techniques over and over until they can be performed on an
unconscious level. Referred to as emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983: 6-7) this kind
of work requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward
countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. Emotional labor
also is an integral part to how a waitress constructs meaning in a menu. While
emotional labor may not yield the same monetary results in restaurants like Lous,
it is still essential to the work. For example, John is masterful in the way he utilizes
emotional labor. On one particularly busy evening John was trapped in a line at
the bar waiting to place his drink order. He was clearly anxious, and was looking
at his food order tickets to see what he needed to do next. The crowd of customers
waiting to be seated spilled out of the foyer and into the aisle near where the
waitresses and waiters were waiting to place their drink orders. One customer, who
recognized John, caught his attention:
John:

hi=

Customer:

=hi can I get a glass of wine

John:

sure (.) what do you want

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Customer:

are you busy

John:

NO (.) I got it (.) what do you want

Johns friendly hi and over emphatic no were intended to suggest to the

customer that he was not busy, when he clearly was. As he later explained, he
knew that the customer knew he was really busy, but he also knew that if he was
friendly and accommodating, the customer probably would give him a nice tip for
his trouble, which the customer did. His feigned amiability in agreeing to get the
customer a drink was more or less a monetary performance. John had learned to use
language for financial gain. One should not be fooled by the apparent simplicity
in the preceding interaction. While it may be brief, being able to be friendly and
accommodating under extreme circumstances like the dinner rush requires years of
practice in a real work setting learning to be able to say, hisureNO, I got it.
Although interactions with customers have been presented individually, the
reality of how these events occur is quite different. Unlike fine-dining restaurants
where the dinner experience can extend over a few hours, diners operate on high
volume serving to a great number of patrons in a short amount of time. George
Orwell, reflecting on the difficulty involved in this work, wrote, I calculated that
[a waiter] had to walk and run about 15 miles during the day and yet the strain
of the work was more mental than physical.One has to leap to and fro between
a multitude of jobsit is like sorting a pack of cards against the clock (Orwell,
1933). Because one person may be serving as many as ten tables or more at one
time, the process of serving each individual table will overlap with the others. Food
orders are taken numerous times in a half-hour period during busy dinner hours at
Lous. The preceding transcriptions were taken from tape-recorded data collected
on Friday evenings around 7 oclock. My own interactions were recorded during a
period when I had what is referred to as a full station, meaning that all of the tables
under my supervision were filled with customers. By this point in the evening I
had two customers at the counter, a party of four and six parties of two, for a total
of eighteen customersall of whom were in the process of ordering their meals
within the same half-hour to forty-five minute period.
Literacy practices in this environment are nothing like those found in traditional
classrooms, but they might be more comparable to those found in the emergency
ward of a hospital or an air-traffic controllers tower. Interaction with texts and
participants takes place in a rapid succession of small chunks. During the dinner
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hours, there are no long drawn out monologues. Time is of the essence during the
busiest dinner hours for all participants involved: from the waiters and waitresses
to the cooks, bartenders, and busboys. In two hundred lines of transcribed dialogue
during a busy dinner period, for example, I never paused longer than thirtynine seconds, and no participant spoke more than forty-one words in one turn.
Even these pauses were usually the result of other work being completed, such
as preparing a salad or waiting to order a drink. During this period, virtually all
the conversation, reading, and writing were related to the immediate situational
context. As this research has shown, language use was far more complex than
one might assume in situations and events that involve taking a customers food
order. In addition to knowing how food is prepared, what will appeal to specific
customers, and how to present this information in a friendly manner, the waiter
or waitress must also remain conscious of the number of other tables waiting to
have their orders taken and the amount of time that will take. Reading menus and
reading customers requires the ability to think and react quickly to a multitude of
almost simultaneously occurring literate events.

Conclusion
Menus at Lous are texts that are catalysts for interaction between staff and
customers, and their meaning is firmly embedded in this interaction. Meaning
is constructed from the menu through more than one mode of communication
and between a variety of participants. This process involves knowledge of food
preparation, use specific linguistic devices like magic words and other ways of
describing food, the ability to read individual customers tastes and preferences,
the general expectation to perform in a friendly manner, and all during numerous
virtually simultaneous and similar events. Yet, there is much left unconsidered
in this chapter, particularly regarding the nature of power and control. While
waitresses and waiters are frequently able to manipulate control over customer
decisions while taking a food order, this control is often tenuous and insignificant
beyond the immediate interaction.
Little also has been said in this chapter about the role of management.
Extensive research has already been done in the area of management control,
literacy, and worker skills (Braverman, 1974; Hochschild, 1983; Kress, 1993;
Leidner, 1993; Hall, 1993; Hull et al., 1996; MacDonald and Sirianni, 1996; Gee,
Hull, and Lankshear, 1996). These researchers consider how literacy practices
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are manipulated by management to maintain control over the worker. Whether

it be scientific management where workers are deskilled and routinized, or Fast
Capitalism where forms of control are more insidious and shrouded in the guise of
empowering the worker, there is little research on interactive service work beyond
the fast food industry that explores how this rhetoric plays itself out in a real world
situation. This leaves open to debate questions regarding the effectiveness of Fast
Capitalism as a form of control over the worker. While my research has shown that
waiters and waitresses can exercise some level of authority, skill and wit through
their use of language with customers, they must also interact with management and
other staff where authority and control plays out in different ways.
In the end, however, the customer has ultimate authority over the waiter or
waitress. Diner waitressing has a long history of prejudice dating back to the
beginning of the industrial revolution and involves issues of gender regarding our
general perceptions and ways of interacting (Cobble, 1991; Hall, 1993). Waitressing
is integrally tied to domesticated housework and likewise has historically been
treated as requiring little skill or ability. In fact, the stigma of servitude that plagues
waitressing and other similar kinds of work are not only the result of less than
respectable treatment from management, but from customers as well. In her
sociological study of diner waitresses in New Jersey, Greta Paules sums it up best:
That customers embrace the service-as-servitude metaphor is evidenced by the
way they speak to and about service workers. Virtually every rule of etiquette is
violated by customers in their interactions with the waitress: the waitress can be
interrupted; she can be addressed with the mouth full; she can be ignored and stared
at; and she can be subjected to unrestrained anger. Lacking status as a person she
like the servant, is refused the most basic considerations of polite interaction. She
is, in addition, the subject of chronic criticism. Just as in the nineteenth century
servants were perceived as ignorant, slow, lazy, indifferent, and immoral (Sutherland
1981), so in the twentieth century service workers are condemned for their stupidity,
apathy, slowness, competence, and questionable moral character. (1991: 138-139)
The low status of waitressing and waitering belies the complex nature of this
kind of work and the innovative and creative ways in which such workers use
language.

k
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Endnotes
1

Some of the more than 20 websites I have found so far like waitersrevenge.com
are award winning. They include sites for taxi drivers, hotel workers, and the like.

How to appropriately refer to waitresses and waiters is not a simple decision.

Terms like server and food server are alternatives, but all are problematic. I
personally do not like server or food server because they are too closely related
to the word servitude. The waiter/waitress distinction is problematic not
simply because it differentiates genders, but also because it is associated with
a kind/class of service. Often in fine-dining restaurants today both men and
women are referred to as waiters, but it is more commonly the practice in the
diner style restaurant to maintain the distinctive terms. This is historically
connected to the diner waitressing being regarded as inferior to fine-dining
waitering because it was merely an extension of the domesticated duties of the
household.

Pseudonyms have been used throughout this chapter.

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Better homes and gardens new cook book. (1996). New York: Better Homes and
Gardens.
Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the
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Bureau of Labor Statistics. (1996) Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor.
Drucker, P. (1993). Innovation and entrepreneurship: Practice and principles. New
York: Harperbusiness.
Cobble, S. (1991). Dishing it out: Waitresses and their unions in the 20th century.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gee, J. (1991). Sociolinguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. New York.
Falmer.
Gee, J., Hull, G., and Lankshear, C. (1996). The new work order: Behind the language
of the new capitalism. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Gowen, S. (1992). The politics of workplace literacy. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Hall, E. (1993). Smiling, deferring, and good service. Work and occupations, 20 (4),
452-471.
Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hull, G. (Ed.). (1997). Changing work, changing workers: Critical perspectives on
language, literacy, and skills. New York: State University of New York Press.
Hull, G. et al. (1996). Changing work, changing literacy? A study of skills requirements
and development in a traditional and restructured workplace. Final Report.
Unpublished manuscript. University of California at Berkeley.
Kress, G. (1993). Genre as social process. In B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (Eds.),
The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing (pp. 22-37). London:
Falmer.
Kress, G. (1995). Writing the future: English and the making of a cultural innovation.
London: NATE.

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Lave, J. and Wegner, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.

New York: Cambridge University Press.
Leidner, R. (1993). Fast food, fast talk: Service work and the routinization of everyday
life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
MacDonald, C. and Sirianni, C. (Eds.). (1996). Working in the service society.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Mahiri, J. and Sablo, S. (1996). Writing for their lives: The non-school literacy of
Californias urban African American youth. Journal of Negro Education, 65 (2),
164-180.
Mars, G. and Nicod, M. (1984). The world of waiters. London: Unwin Hyman.
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social
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NSSB (National Skills Standards Board). (1995). Server skill standards: National
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Orwell, G. (1993). Down and out in Paris and London. New York. Harcourt Brace.
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NOW THAT YOUVE READ, what are your thoughts?

1. Whats Lous restaurant like? What was Mirabellis role there? Whos
Harvey? Who is John? What were their roles there?
2. Mirabelli describes the restaurant menu [as] a genre unto itself
(149). What does he mean by this? How does he describe the variety
of ways this genre is put to use? What literacy events surround the use
of the menu at Lous, at least as they are articulated in this essay? How
do these compare with the literacy events youve witnessed at other
restaurants?
3. Not only must the menu be read and acted upon, but the food service
worker must also read the customer. What does it mean to read the
customer? How do literacy practices further complicate the work of a
server?
4. The essay suggests that literacy practices in this environment
are nothing like those found in traditional classrooms. A better
comparison, according to Mirabelli, might be the emergency ward
of a hospital or an air-traffic controllers tower (158). What does he
mean by this comparison? What other comparisons can you make that
might serve as a good analogy for the way literacy functions in the
various restaurants with which you are most familiar?

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WRITING ASSIGNMENT
This essay calls upon you to describe literacy practices as they function in a
particular place (in your church, in your workplace, in your home, in a store you
frequent, or someplace else).
In developing this essay, you should consider questions like these: What texts
are involved? At church, this may include the church bulletin, Bibles resting on
the church pews, and hymnals, but they might also include notices posted in the
church entrance, signage indicating where members should go, and so on. At home,
relevant texts might include any and all reading materials found on the shelves,
on the coffee table, in your room, in the rooms of the people living in the home in
which you grew up. Name these items. Tell us where in the home these materials
are located. Discuss where the reading typically takes place (and who is typically
involved). Dont forget to discuss the reading of magazines and newspapers (even if
it is just to locate coupons or information about the latest game) and any reading/
writing that takes place online (gaming, blogging, research). How are these texts
put to use by the people involved in this context? Who develops these texts? Where do the
people making use of these texts typically procure them?
Requirements: You must make use of Barton and Hamiltons article and
either Moss or Mirabelli (or all three), especially as they describe the theoretical
framework you will be using. Take some time to unpack the Barton and Hamiltons
key arguments, then those made by Moss and/or Mirabelli and your position
in relation to them; next consider how they are (or are not) true of your own
experiences with literacy acquisition in the particular place you are describing. You
might also find Brandts key arguments helpful here, especially the metaphor of
sponsorship.

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