A Great Day From A Reservation of Two

On Thursday night at the restaurant I was walking by this table when I thought I recognized someone whom I had served somewhere else not too long ago.

Upon going over to the table and saying hello he immediately replied back that he thought he recognized me when I passed by a few times before that. This guy used to come in usually with a group of 6 to 10 each Friday night about 9PM where I used to work at this restaurant called Terrace on the Green , http://www.terraceonthegreen.ca/

They were lawyers who used to come in with their wives and chat and drink and when everyone left the restaurant sit around and tell some real awesome funny jokes. We chatted for a bit the other night but this restaurant had to be the best money making restaurants I ever did work in.

One day it was forecasted to be a slow day so me and another guy Miguel who is 6-7 years older than I am were the only ones scheduled. You see in this place the owner Alex used to run a skeleton crew. In other words you needed to sit people , bartend , wait on tables , run your food if not someone elses' , be a busser , reset , clean up and polish silver after. In other words , do everything. The nice thing about that though is you pretty much didn't have to tip out anyone , just a 5% on the tips on credit cards to the house.

So this particular day , we had 2 reservations for lunch in the book and none for dinner. We are pretty much anticipating a slack day.

Lunch comes and the dining room fills up big time. We get every regular and good tipping customer we ever get all in one day. One guy always orders this $350 bottle of wine and he buys 3 of them for his table throughout lunch. At the end of lunch Miguel and I have made $200 each.

Now we have some lunch and getting ready for the evening service when the phone starts ringing and before dinner we have about 28 reservations. Looks like it will be a good night as well and it was. We got about 32 in total and we were out by 10:30 which was pretty neat.

In all that day on a day when we had 2 people in the reservation book we walked out of there with $428 in tips. Now that was a good payday!

Anyone else care to share a slow day turning into a cash windfall unexpectedly in the blogoshere?