The Stupidest Mistakes I Made Working in Hospitality
Never a dull moment when you work in hospitality. Every new job is exciting, but with little experience, I honestly found the hospitality industry absolutely terrifying. You don’t want to make mistakes, but you also don’t want to appear insecure around your colleagues, and on top of that you still have to communicate with guests. I often found that last part the scariest: they pay for their drinks, food and the whole shebang, so if you don’t look after a table properly, people often take an instant dislike to you. At least, that’s how it felt to me.
You can probably already guess: the pressure at the start of my hospitality career… grotesque! The result: sweaty palms, stammering at the table, no longer knowing left from right, and so on. My first hospitality job (about 16 years ago now) was at a fairly upscale restaurant owned by Herman den Blijker—you probably know him. So the service had to be good and correct. Although it was a long time ago, I still remember my beginner’s mistakes as if they happened yesterday. But there were also plenty of embarrassing moments later in my hospitality career, and these are the worst:
The Stupidest Mistakes I Made Working in Hospitality
1. No one explained to me how to walk with multiple plates in one hand/arm. They simply assumed I knew; I didn’t. The result was that I thought everyone was just really good at balancing (I wasn’t) and I let the hot plates swing around on my arm with tea towels underneath. So. Many. Broken. Plates.
2. At that same restaurant, the chef explained the off-menu dishes only once. My memory wasn’t hospitality-trained yet, so I had forgotten them after five seconds, but the chef refused to repeat them. The situation: having to tell a party of 20 that their intermediate course was a meatball with Harry Koeffers. It wasn’t. It was a vegetarian ball (I still don’t know the ingredients) and haricots verts.
3. For years I worked at a brown café near Leidseplein, where tourists mainly ordered pints of beer. I could handle all that, but in the rush I momentarily forgot there was a step by the door. I literally flew out through the door, and the man at the middle table on the absolutely packed terrace had seven pints of beer poured all over him. Seven. He was not amused.
4. And then you think you’ve finally mastered balancing the plates and head smoothly to a table with three at once. The first one goes well… Then you forget that the fish, including its butter sauce, is no longer properly level in your other hand. And you realize that when the woman starts screaming because she now has an entire plate of butter sauce in her hair. She was not amused either.
5. Once I had started learning the etiquette a little, I knew that the first plate should be placed in front of the oldest woman. Can you imagine my blind panic when there was a fairly large party made up entirely of older women? I genuinely had no idea where to start, but it soon became clear that I had made the wrong choice. If looks could kill…
6. This wasn’t really a blunder, but it was a moment when I wanted the ground to swallow me up… I had to explain the fish of the day to a well-known Amsterdam criminal whose nickname came from his large nose. It was a nose fish. I had to tell The Nose that he could be served a nose fish. Terrified.
7. The mash up of words: when I have a lot of things going on in my head at once, my words sometimes get mixed up. So when a guest thanked me for something that was really no trouble, I got tangled up between ‘no problem’ and ‘you’re welcome’. The result: ‘no welcome.’
8. This could go straight into a comedy film: I had to work on Valentine’s Day, and the restaurant had been decorated beautifully and romantically. As a newcomer, I was allowed to work in the conservatory, where couples mainly came for a drink. Lots of (pink) champagne bottles, then. Had I ever opened champagne before? No, but how difficult could it be? Well, the cork came out easily… But it flew straight into the ceiling and then onto that guy’s head. Side note: that evening, the manager told me that perhaps the restaurant and I together weren’t such a great plan after all. I got dumped on Valentine’s Day.
Bonus: This wasn’t necessarily a blunder on my part, but more on his. The husband of a well-known Dutch model came to pay for himself and his party. He wanted to pay by credit card, but had done a lot of shopping that same day: ‘Do you know whether the Mastercard limit can be above €20,000?’ I blinked sweetly and replied that if I knew that, I probably wouldn’t be working five days a week in hospitality to make ends meet. No, on further consideration, he didn’t think so either.
Also read:
- 8x Being Short and Working in Hospitality
- The Most Annoying Pranks People Pull in Hospitality
- Bizarre and Disgusting Behavior by Hospitality Guests #2
