Waiter Quotes

By being a waiter 100 percent, I think I was a lot like any other actor in New York. I had credits because I’d work lunches during the week, and then on a Wednesday would go be lucky enough to be in a movie like ‘Kinsey.’

For me, good service is efficient and discreet; it’s that critical balance. As soon as the client sits down, the communication flow has to start. Customers need to feel that the waiters are supervised – that there’s a system in place.

What’s that comment about every actor being a waiter who is out of a job? I did a lot of waitressing, and I loved it because I love getting to know people from different places.

Why can’t teachers end up owning schools, the way waiters can open their own restaurants?

Lie and tell the waiter that you’re deathly allergic to butter. This way you can enjoy the steak without all the excess fat.

I like America; I enjoy being there. Some people can’t stand the insincerity – I love the waiter asking me how my day has been, the can-do culture there. I love the fact that again, you are visible in America. You turn the TV on, there are black politicians, black policemen, black soldiers.

With my wife I don’t get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to ‘the best woman a man ever had.’ The waiter joined me.

I was a lousy waiter, dealing with people and having people in your face like that.

Working Holiday’ goes out to those earning their pay and a half: from retail employees at the mall and the kids selling popcorn at the movies, to the waiters at Chinese restaurants!

I was an amazing bartender and a great waiter. I think, in a way, that was my acting school.

As everyone knows, tips constitute the bulk of a waiter’s or waitress’s income. But they are also optional, at least in theory. Does it really seem like a good idea to make someone’s salary so susceptible to customers’ whims on a given day – or whether any customers happen to show up at all?

I worked as a waiter when I was 15 and got a chance to appreciate good, simple food. There’s nothing better than a boiled egg with toast.

Waiters are like actors waiting in the wings, bantering whenever we passed each other on the restaurant floor, shouting at each other backstage in the kitchen and winking and corpsing above the heads of our audience, the unsuspecting customers.

I haven’t had to do anything outside of show business my whole life. I’ve never been a waiter. I’ve only worked and gotten paid. It hasn’t been a classic example of someone slogging through the business.

I went into a French restaraunt and asked the waiter, ‘Have you got frog’s legs?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ so I said, ‘Well hop into the kitchen and get me a cheese sandwich.’

My father was a guy who, because of the businesses he was in – the hotel business, the hospitality business – he didn’t differentiate between the waiter serving you dinner, from the maitre d from the guy who owns a restaurant. Everybody was the same to him. He didn’t look at who you were. He didn’t look at your wallet.

I did quite a lot of menial jobs. I was a waiter, an inventory clerk touring round properties listing cups and saucers, and a laserquest marshal.

You wouldn’t have the same art on the walls at every restaurant or the same waiter uniforms. Neither should you have the same service style at every restaurant.

If I can’t eat the meal in a restaurant, and the waiter asks, ‘Is everything all right, Madam?’, I tell them that I’m on a diet.

A diplomat these days is nothing, but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

To go to the Oscars for Moneyball – that was pretty amazing. And to be able to go work with Kathryn Bigelow – that’s going to be pretty sweet. Hopefully I don’t have to go back to being a waiter. That’s still my main goal.

Until Lee Elder, the only blacks at the Masters were caddies or waiters. To ask a black man what he feels about the traditions of the Masters is like asking him how he feels about his forefathers who were slaves.

Pre-‘Tokyo Drift,’ I was like: ‘Am I gonna play Yakuza #1 and Chinese Waiter #2 for the rest of my life? Is America even ready for an Asian face that speaks English, that doesn’t do Kung Fu?’

My indifference to money and my spendthrift ways are disgraceful. You have no idea how reckless I am; how often I practically throw money out of the window. I am always making good resolutions, but the next minute I forget and give the waiter eightpence.

There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.

If I’m brought the wrong order at a restaurant, I don’t send it back, because I don’t want the waiter to get mad at me.

When I talk about my husband, I feel as if people roll their eyes. It’s like when you’re 16 and order a martini, and the waiter says, ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’. They can’t grasp that I’m old enough to be married.

I mean, I’ve had bartenders and waiters and waitresses make a comment about a joke of mine, like pointing out some sort of logic error or something that I’ve never even thought about, and they’re right.

I’ve done so many jobs. As an actor, you have to. I didn’t have my parents footing the bill when I moved to New York. I moved here with, like, 300 bucks. I was a bike messenger. I was a waiter. I was a bartender. I worked in a consignment shop for high-end designers.

I like L.A. It’s like a mini break. For a writer, it’s hilarious. Like the food. Where I come from, we eat chip sandwiches: white bread, butter, tomato catsup and big fat french fries. It’s delicious. Here, you order a creme caramel and the waiter says, ‘You know, that contains dairy.’

I was not a great bartender, but I did OK. I wasn’t great at being efficient behind the bar, but I was pretty great at talking to people. I was a pretty good waiter. It was painstaking to get me to care about the clientele of some of these places I was working at.

A man needs to be polite, not just to me but to everyone. I watch that. How does he treat the waiter? How does he treat the coat-check girl? How does he treat the driver?

The Ritz in London has an old-fashioned charm, with waiters wearing tails and white gloves. The dining room is exquisite, with immaculate service and ornate details.

When I was a kid, like 14 or 15, I played with the waiters from the hotel, ’cause that was the best game. And these guys, they’d let me play. And they were black guys.

A restaurant is a compendium of choices that the owner has made. If you look around a restaurant, everything represents a choice: the kind of salt shaker that’s on the table, the art on the walls, the uniforms on the waiters.

When those waiters ask me if I want some fresh ground pepper, I ask if they have any aged pepper.

My father was and is a great father. My father always wanted to do stand-up. He wanted to be an actor. But instead he did two jobs. He did customer service at a hospital and he worked as a waiter at night. He pretty much sacrificed everything for his daughters.

I was born in Newton, MA. Graduated from Brown University in 2001 with honors in English as a playwright. I attended the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, CT just after Brown. I moved to NYC in 2002 and was a professional… waiter, for 3 years.

If I worked as a waiter, I’d go home and write songs and record them. I’d have to. It’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing I can do.

I wasn’t meant to be a cook. It’s a profession I accidentally fell into one summer between college semesters while looking for an easy job as a waiter. Nobody would hire me as a server, but one restaurant, in desperate need of a prep cook, told me that if I could hold a knife, I could have a job.

‘Fine dining.’ I’d love to know who coined the term and whether they meant it to be as offputting as it is. The words evoke an idea of phoney refinement, of needless flummery, snooty waiters, and an atmosphere designed to intimidate the customer.

If a guy treats me respectfully and the waiter demeaningly, I’m turned off.

I’ve been auditioning since I was 20, working as a waiter, getting theater gigs, doing the ‘Law and Order’s.

How someone treats a waiter or doorman can tell you so much about a person.

Let Dion Waiters be him. Correct me when I’m wrong but let me make mistakes.

Unlike in Europe, where serving is often a career rather than a backup plan, American table-waiting remains a bootstrap business, and some of the biggest skeptics of waiter training courses and schools are seasoned servers themselves.

My dad lived on Sunset Boulevard for a couple of years as a waiter, and he said he’d do a different character every time somebody sat down, just to get some practice.

I didn’t start making a real living until eight or nine years in. Even after ‘Goodfellas’ came out, I was still working as a waiter, and people would recognize me – that was an odd experience. But when ‘The Sopranos’ hit, that was like an exponential leap.

A waiter at the hotel kept telling me that Cape Town is just like a European city, but it’s not like that at all. It doesn’t feel safe, and I didn’t really go out at night.

I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That’s one reason I overtip. I love when skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me.

I have been working since I was 20, and I’m 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20’s making $10,000 a year.

Everything I do, I go to black people. If I have a problem at the airport, I’ll go to the black ticket agent. I hope they notice me because I’ll get better service. If I’m at a restaurant, I look for the black waiter. Rent-a-Car, give you the upgrade.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one.

I don’t feel like I really hit puberty until I was almost 17. I’d go to dinner with my family, and I’m 15 or 16 years old, and the waiter was still giving me the children’s menu.

I hire a lot of waiters, waitresses. Someone who’s successful has a background that’s not predictable.

I held down as many jobs as I could find, from being a waiter to working at a yoga studio and as a ticket-taker at a small theater company – anything that would allow me to go out and do auditions.

Los Angeles is peopled by waiters and carpenters and drivers who are there to be actors.

I hate it when people are impolite to waiters or to the valet or the guy in the supermarket. There’s no need for that; it doesn’t cost anything to be polite.

I would say a full-time waiter in a high-price house could easily make $75,000, $80,000 a year.

I don’t think you should be allowed to eat in a restaurant if you haven’t waited tables at least once. It’s so irritating when I see people being rude to waiters, like, it makes me want to slit their throats! Like, really? You’re really this inconsiderate?

Restaurants should be democratic; you shouldn’t be made to feel privileged for getting a table or being lectured by the waiter.

I’m an assistant storyteller. It’s like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I’m waiting on six million people a week, if I’m lucky.

Portion control is a real problem. My husband and I always split one appetizer and one entree. I’m sure waiters hate us.

Steakhouses sort of have this old-school nature to them; they’re like museums full of good food. It’s fun hearing the waiter share his expertise on the different cuts of beef and how they’re going to cut up your baked potato.

With the education I had, all I could do was work as a burro, in whatever I could find: shoeshine boy, janitor, dishwasher, waiter, bartender, cashier, bricklayer, painter.

I basically modeled my way through college, doing local runway shows in L.A. that don’t pay a lot and a couple of shows in N.Y. and S.F., and I probably made the same as the average 19-year-old waiter; I just worked less and was around beautiful girls, so it was nice.

If you’re a waiter, the worst thing you can do is go to work resenting your job. This will sound trite – but it’s the reality, and part of my personality – yet when I was a waiter, I tried to be the best waiter, and when I was a bingo-caller I tried to be the best bingo-caller.

If you’re a waiter and you’re waiting on me, you might get five percent, you might get seventy percent. It depends on how bad my math skills are that day.

I had a little delivery van, and I did work around Queens. I was also a waiter at Red Lobster, so I was working on the business in between jobs.

The first time I was in London, I went to an English greasy spoon to get some breakfast and realised that all the waiters were speaking Italian. That’s when it hit me what an international city this is.

I don’t like grand restaurants or kowtowing waiters. I don’t need that kind of attention and I don’t want it.

I spent two summers working at Camp Curry and at Yosemite Lodge as a waiter. It gave me a chance to really be there every day – to hike up to Vernal Falls or Nevada Falls. It just took me really deep into it. Yosemite claimed me.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they’re talking.

From being a waiter, to a door-to-door salesman, to a car-washer, to a delivery boy – I have done it all.

Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses – it’s progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.

A Cannibal is a person who walks into a restaurant and orders a waiter.

It didn’t get any more glamorous than Havana, Cuba, in the 1950s. I used to go there when I was a waiter on a cruise ship.

I was working in restaurants as a captain and as a waiter.

Once I started working as a professional actor, it was like, ‘Bye-bye waiting tables, bye-bye bartending, bye-bye all the cliched jobs actors do.’ But after a year of not getting work, there’s this really difficult conflict, like, ‘Do I have to go back to being a waiter when people recognize me from a show?’

I definitely had fun being a waiter. I can’t say for sure that I was a good waiter. I think that I made people have a good time.

When I was a waiter, I wanted to be the best waiter I could be and worked to be better at it every day.

They were tough times and I started working when I was 10 years old, delivering papers and eventually becoming a waiter.

I was a busboy, a waiter, a manager, a sommelier… like… all of it from a family-run Polish restaurant, with, like, grandmas in the basement hand-making pierogies, to working at Bond Street for a while. I’ve done it all.

I’ve never had to get a job as a waiter or anything. I’ve always been able to support myself in ‘the biz.’ Which is great. It’s really fantastic to be able to say that, because I know it’s hard to do.

I left school at 16 and skipped university to work, initially as a waiter. I think I missed out on what would have been great years.

The British tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters.

There are career waiters in Los Angeles, and they’re making over $100,000 a year.