“You’ve got your coat on.”
“No, Mark,” the old Bengali man with the shaved head said, rushing towards the table smiling. “No, look, I’m not wearing my coat.” He brushed his dark shirt and tie tucked into black trousers.
Mark, the customer in the restaurant was referring to me, though he seemed to be addressing my Dad, who rushed towards him with a wide smile. I was standing wearing my large black coat and leaning against a chair in the restaurant. It was nearly 12 pm and officially the restaurant closed at 11 pm.
“I’ve been coming here all these years and I’ve never been kicked out before,” Mark continued.
He was a plump man who looked younger than his likely late thirties. His friend, who he’d been in deep conversation with was a younger, plumper man.
“No Jason,” my Dad said, offering out a hand and still smiling effusively. “It’s nice to see you after all this time. Make sure you come back soon.”
“I might do if you don’t kick me out,” Mark continued, with a stiff smile. He inched his way out from the table towards the restaurant door.
“Bring your whole family,” my Dad said. “We haven’t seen them for so long. You’re like family, do you know that? You’re like our family.”
I listened to this scene with my heart in my mouth and my eyes cast downwards, a vague smile held on my face. I felt the flutter of adrenaline. I was ready to fight – that is, I was ready to give Mark a piece of my mind if he directed a comment at me. I held my ground, in my coat, though I shifted nervously on the spot.
We had every right to get ready to leave. It was an hour past closing time. Mark was being unreasonable and selfish. I felt enraged and ready to hit out. But, I also felt afraid, So, I smiled vaguely and avoided looking directly at him.
The two customers left the restaurant and my Dad, who had momentarily disappeared into the vestibule to hold the doors open, enabling them to squeeze past him and into the cold February night, walked back to the bar.
“Jason’s been coming since 1984. Before you were born,” my Dad said to me. “He’s an industrial plumber. He’s made millions. He used to live around here but he sold his house and moved into a private road. He’s a millionaire.”
I felt even more contempt for the baby-faced Mark and his improbable millions.
It made sense, however, why he should feel such entitlement. Our restaurant’s service is built on servility. Since working here for the last two months, after having for so long refused to have anything to do with it, I’ve seen servility that I didn’t know existed in modern Britain – not in the modern Britain that I existed in, anyway. A servility that has been my Dad’s whole working life, more-or-less.
My Dad and a number of other waiters rush to help customers with their coats, smiling through the teasing comments. “Ooh, what about me,” an old man said, as my Dad helped on the coat of his female partner by holding the coat behind her as she reached her arms into it.
Of course, my Dad laughed noisily. Just as he did when he had helped an old man into his long coat, having fetched it from the hanger at the back of the restaurant where he had put it away, only for the man to realise that he had put it on back to front. It’s strange to see my Dad laugh because he’s an angry person and, once upon a time, violent sort of person. But he reserves laughter for customers. It’s more a gape with noise, than laughter.
My Dad rushes to hold open the doors for every customer when they come in and out. As customers start rising from their seats and begin reaching for their coats, my Dad scuttles to the front and stands with the door held open. There are two doors to the vestibule and he will go into the vestibule and hold one door open with each hand, as if holding back two tides as he waits for the customer to put on their coats, gather their things and head out.
He calls them Sir and Madam and repeats thank you in response to almost everything anyone says. When taking an order at a table, he says thank you after every request.
When customer’s are kind, the servility does not seem so bad. But, so many customers are grumpy, conceited or, even, rude and still my Dad gives them the thank you Sir/Madam treatment. There’s customers who can’t seem to express anything except bitterness. Their humour, their thanks, their greetings, everything has a grudging undertone. Some might call it banter. But this is one-way banter. The jokes go one way and are swallowed up by practiced smiles and uneasy laughter.
A customer was taking home some of their meal home in a takeaway bag. I saw it on the table and to make conversation, I said, “Oh, you’re taking some food home.” The man’s response – a fifty year old Cockney regular – was, blankly – “Yeah, is that okay with you?” I gurned and said, “yeah, of course.”
When the tall careful eyed Mr Smith comes in, with an air of geniality, my Dad rushes to him with a glass of lager in hand. Mr Smith seems taken aback by this offering but gulps it down before carrying off his collected takeaway.
My Dad throws in free bottles of cokes to orders that he considers big enough. There’s no set figure for this but it usually approximates as anything over £40. Here’s a coke, I say, when taking a delivery to a perpetually drunk man who lives on the third floor of a flat. I always expect customers to ask why they’re being given a coke but no-one has.
Things have changed a bit in the industry, even if our restaurant seems stuck in the 70s, with its white layers of table cloth, musty carpet, fake flowers, coloured spotlights set in a low ceiling, Indian wind instrument ambience, tinted front glass and odour of popadoms.
One of the staff told me that there was a time that customers would sit in the restaurant until the early hours, until 1 am or 2 am – and waiters would continue serving. “They didn’t care how long we worked,” he told me.
I remember, as a child, my Dad coming home after midnight and sleeping through the day. We didn’t dare wake him. Sometimes, our squabbles would wake him and then all hell would let lose. He’d roar and rush at us like a lion and then man=handle us and then thrash us with a cane. It was his rage that was the most terrifying. He never hit us particularly hard but, from his bulging face, you would have thought he was ready to kill us.
I don’t know if our restaurant is more servile than the rest. Sycophancy comes to my Dad easily. But, from what I see, the Bangladeshi restaurant industry has existed on the margins of workers’ rights, with exploitation of labour rife and that still seems to exist to this day, though things are slowly changing. There is a culture of superiority amongst the clientele and subservience from the staff. The dynamics have a horrible and inevitable racial element, to my mind.
anxietyetc 