Cetin Odabasi sweeps an arm around the glitzy dining room in which we stand. “OK, so this is the table number, and this is the layout,” he announces. “This is very important,” he adds, “because whatever you’ve got to take to a table, this means you know where to go.” He speaks quickly, in a strong Turkish accent, still charged with energy after a hectic service for which the Oven restaurant was nearly full. Not bad, it must be said, for a midweek lunchtime in post-recession Darlington.

“So: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10!” Merrily, he sings off the numbers and his finger darts from tablecloth to tablecloth. I nod, understanding perhaps a tenuous 70% of what he has been telling me, and feeling every bit the frightened novice I have told him to imagine that I am. Timidly, I venture a question: what happens if you push two tables together?

“Well,” Odabasi begins patiently, “I have six tables here, but normally it’s five, which has made our life a little bit hard today. So you have to add on one more here. And with the new till system we cannot create 5a and 5b. So this is always table five. And if you have table three here, for example: one, two, three, but table four is missing because those two tables have been joined together.” I nod again, fraudulently. Though I had expected to write an article about how many people underestimate the complexity of being a waiter, I didn’t realise that I was one of them.

Continue reading . . .

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