“I have been screamed at. I have had fingers in my face. I have been called names. I have had something thrown at me,” she said. One customer hurled a water glass at her feet and stormed out after she repeatedly asked him to put on a mask. “I have never been yelled at like that before in my life, until I was asking people to simply put a piece of cloth over their face that I was wearing eight to 10 hours a day.”
Once upon a time, the host, or maître d’ in formal dining rooms, held a position of some prestige and power, as the public face of the restaurant and the arbiter of who got the most coveted tables. Today, the job is often entry-level, and saddled with the difficult tasks of asking customers to don masks, maintain social distancing or present proof of vaccination. Hosts have to judge whether diners have complied, and to deal with any blowback.
Good piece @ElsieDee. I’ve wondered about how the lunch ladies here in L.A. are doing. They’re enterprises aren’t as big or essential as the dabbawalas, but they do a steady business carrying coolers and baskets full of sandwiches, salads & baked goods to office buildings, hair salons, etc. I wonder if the vendors benefitted at all from Covid relief aid?
I think these side business have faded a bit because of delivery services. But they still exist and the food is homemade and it’s not as pricey. They’re not big enough to be called a mom & pop… more just mom or pop. They came at lunchtime to a couple office buildings I worked in, and they came to a hair salon I patronized prior to the pandemic (now closed due to the pandemic! ). I’ve often wondered what ”the lunch ladies” did during the pandemic and wished I had a biz card.
I had completely forgotten about these types of services. I feel like they started fading away when the food truck trend started. I was working in a big office building in a stretch with multiple other buildings when the Kogi truck started that wave.
The building had Trimana and other buildings had similar bleh generic set ups. I remember those cooler ladies being popular at my floor and in other buildings because their food and value was so better than Trimana, etc.
But when the food truck explosion happened, they stopped coming around. Trucks would park near the buildings and everyone would go down for their lunches instead.
I wonder how viable they were for a lot of buildings pre-panndemic.
Oh food trucks. You’re probably right. I didn’t think about them because the only one that parks near my building is for the nearby construction workers and it’s nothing like Kogi and other gourmet food trucks, lol.
Yep! There was a lunch lady that came into my husbands office and between lunch trucks and the area being serviced by the first incarnation of UberEats… she stopped coming daily and then just gave up on the site. Over at our site, we never had a steady group of folks in the building stay in the building all day, to have a lunch lady, but they were around in the nieghboring buildings… UNTIL… the building management put in Everytable Smart Fridges. Gosh… how I miss those…
). I’ve often wondered what ”the lunch ladies” did during the pandemic and wished I had a biz card.