Gift
I went to dinner at my coworker Kayla’s house last weekend, for the first of what she hopes to become a kind of free supper club. She called it “this is fancy,” and it was fancy — a long table was set up in the middle of the one-bedroom apartment with a white tablecloth and napkins and each course was plated immaculately. There were two types of fluffy focaccia with a black garlic dipping oil, a savory soup with kale, cream, and mushroom bacon, honeynut squash dumplings with fried raisins and pecan milk, a cheese course with tiny bites of poached persimmon or chocolate as pairings, and a perfect satsuma tart with caramelized white chocolate. She’d designed each course for someone in her life. The soup had been invented by her sister, for example, who was trying to recreate something from Olive Garden because that was a fancy restaurant to them growing up and she’d been but Kayla hadn’t. The caramelized white chocolate was for our pastry chef, who’d made it once and it had opened Kayla’s world to a new perfect taste. What she wanted to do with these dinners was invite people in and change their understanding of the world, just a bit, by tasting something wonderful they’d never had before. A little while ago, Kayla saved up to go to a restaurant for a $35 bowl of about five ravioli that was a “highlight of my life,” she explained. Why should people who couldn’t afford to go to such a restaurant be denied a highlight of their lives?
It’s a sound argument, not economically, but as the reasoning of someone with a generous heart. Kayla’s all warmth and generosity, the best of us all really, but I believe most of us at the restaurant want to cook for others because it’s an act of giving. We started out cooking for our family or friends and it felt so good to see them happy and to create these little circles of home around our dinner tables that it was all we wanted to do all the time. Then we went to work at a restaurant and we got paid for cooking, but it wasn’t exactly cooking, it was repetitive movements calculated to be as efficient as possible, stretching us to maximum output every day. Our work is no longer given, but feels, like at many jobs, like it is something taken from us.
Still, I wouldn’t say that the spirit of generosity is entirely absent from the restaurant. The arrangement is transactional, but the delight of the customers (most of them anyway) is real. We light birthday candles on dozens of desserts a night, but each of those is someone’s birthday gift, often photographed, shared, treasured. I’ll miss running food now that I’m not working at the restaurant. The way people lit up when I described a dish was one of the most rewarding parts of the job. There are many aspects of service work that are shit and should be made better, but its transactional nature doesn’t totally rob the work of its humanity.
I felt many things at once as I clocked my last shift at the restaurant. Relief that it was over. Sadness at leaving. The restaurant was very much a place; in its intimacy and peculiarities, it exuded place far more than any office. Even though by the end the work felt like it was killing me, the people there gave me life. They sent me out with a card and a key lime & black sesame “baby cake” and I left with promises that I’d visit often and maybe run tables some nights if they needed. I feel a kind of love for it at the same time as exhaustion just thinking about it.
I wonder if restaurants can exist without chewing up their workers so thoroughly or if the brutal economics of capitalism mean that the best of intentions get mutated into ploys for extracting more work. I don’t think it’s the exchange of money alone that transforms labor from a gift into a burden. The dinner party attendees made donations to cover the cost of ingredients and time and support Kayla’s initiative last week, but that didn’t make the dinner any less of a gift. She hopes to fund the dinners with some sort of grant in the future, which would make the dinners truly a gift to the guests but also make her beholden to an institution.
In between work this week, I’ve been doing more work, preparing a small but elaborate dinner for the wedding celebration of some friends of mine. They’re paying me for the dinner, which is what makes this work, but every part of it has been pure pleasure for me, from designing the menu with them in the center of my mind, to all the little prep tasks I can do in my kitchen with my music at my own pace. I’m high on pregnancy hormones and the smell of garlic as I stir the big soup pot and have never felt more ecstatically content in all my life. This work feels like a gift, to them but also to me.
What I’m reading
Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss
“Daily meaning as well as daily bread,” Terkel writes, is what people are looking for in work, “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Among the people Terkel interviews, the farmer and the flight attendant and the prostitute and the stockbroker, there are some who take deep pleasure in their work—the stonemason, the piano tuner, the bookbinder, the carpenter who is also a poet. The janitor doesn’t mind being a janitor. He doesn’t want to be called a building engineer. “You can call me a janitor,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with a janitor.” But he does mind the pain in his back when he shovels snow and when he uses a mop.
A study of job satisfaction among hospital janitors found that the janitors who reported the greatest satisfaction were the ones who thought of their work as caring for the sick, though their job description was a list of duties like “collect and dispose of soiled linens” and “stock restroom supplies.” When these janitors described their work, they talked of visiting the patients who had the least visitors, joking with patients to cheer them up, writing letters to patients who had gone home and might be lonely, and carefully cleaning the rooms of the patients who were most vulnerable to infection. Without changing jobs, without joining a union, the janitors improved their work life by caring for people. Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.