One P. Z. Didsbury, an American deipnosophist, once said in his wisdom: “In a restaurant when a waiter offers you turbot, ask for salmon, and when he offers you a sole, order a mackerel; as language to men, so fish has been given to the waiter to disguise his thoughts.”
This maligns the individual waiter, of course; the man who is used to attending on you, who knows your likes and dislikes, and takes a personal interest in your contentment, but it is fairly typical of the average restaurant waiter who sees you for the first time and thinks you just one of the ordinary mob. For the casual customer is the facile dupe of the waiter. He comes, he orders his dinner, or preferably, permits it to be ordered for him, pays his bill, and goes away. Eating with him partakes of the stoking process, and he recks little of the particular à la offered to him, if it be toothsome, and saucily disguised.
In the best restaurants, as well in England as on the Continent, deception, fraud, and trickery are comparatively rare. They would not pay. But in nearly every restaurant below the class of the best some one or other or all of the traditional time-honoured wiles of the waiter are practised on the more or less unsuspecting customer.
There is, for instance, the well-known trick of “Putting the change to bed.” It is preferably employed when a man is dining with a lady who, to the cynical and experienced eye of the waiter, is obviously not his wife. This is the very simple modus operandi. Your bill, we will say, as presented to you, discreetly folded in half on a plate, comes to one pound fifteen shillings. You place a couple of sovereigns under the upper fold of the bill. The waiter returns with the change. If you are careless you do not count it. You see half a crown on the bill, and say nonchalantly “All right.” Whereupon the waiter is exceeding glad, for you have given him five shillings. If, on the other hand, you are observant, accurate, and careful, you will say, “The change is not right.” The waiter, who has carefully concealed the second half-crown between the bill and the plate, will semi-indignantly say, “I beg your pardon, sir!” and drawing away the bill, the two half-crowns will be exposed to view. After having doubted his word, you cannot do less than give the poor man the two coins. So the waiter scores either way. “Putting the change to bed” rarely fails.
Mr. Pinero illustrated this trick very neatly in his delightful farce, “The Magistrate,” some years ago at the Old Court Theatre.
It is said that some of the most famous conjurers of to-day began life as restaurant waiters, and certainly the knack of palming the cork of the wine you ordered, and serving you with an inferior quality thereof, meanwhile gravely depositing the palmed cork next to the bottle, in its cradle, is a very old and usually successful trick. It is as well, too, to see that the label on the wine bottle is dry and stuck fast, because, unless you have ordered the man “just to take the chill off,” he may have helped himself from the common stock of red or white wine, and affixed the label of your particular vintage as he came upstairs.
It is quite extraordinary how many men who pride themselves on knowing a good bottle of wine are deceived in this way. There is an old story of three men dining together at a cheap restaurant. One ordered a pint of Pontet Canet, another a pint of Medoc, and the third a pint of Beaune. The waiter went to a speaking-tube, and shouted down it, “Three small reds!”
The question of the substitution of corks has many and quaint developments. An enormous trade is done at third- and fourth-rate restaurants with “faked” champagne, which it were mere flattery to call even “sparkling petrol.” The restaurateurs, foreigners it is to be hoped to a man, import a thoroughly innocuous thin white wine, and then bottle and aerate it, just as they would soda-water. The corks are replaced (after being drawn) by genuine corks of well-known brands, and there is a large market for good, sound, used champagne corks. This market is supplied by the waiters at good-class restaurants, where wines correct to designation are served. If the diner does not happen to collect champagne corks (and few of us have this weakness), the waiter carefully gathers them when clearing the table for dessert.
This is a genuine letter addressed by such a waiter to a reputable firm of champagne importers: “I beg to send you a hundred corks of the well-known brands of —— and ——. They may be useful to you. I am waiter at ——, and am often asked by customers to recommend a wine. Awaiting your favourable reply, I am, etc.”