It’s hard to find words to describe the evening scene at Jake’s Famous Crawfish in the late 1970s, but that’s what I’m here for so I’ll take a stab at it. This was a time toward the end of the Disco Era when drinking and doing drugs were not merely ill-advised and poorly managed recreational activities but actually required to maintain respect in society. At least the social circles that frequented restaurants and bars, and the one who worked in them. Consequently, the scene in the bar at Jake’s was a freewheeling ‘meet market’ for singles, not all of whom were technically single, and a buzzing bacchanalia in the dining room with frequent trips to the bathrooms which didn’t necessarily involve going to the bathroom.
Starting at five o’clock sharp when the dining room opened for dinner service, tipsy patrons from the already packed bar would start filtering in to see if they could claim a table. And the front door started swinging to admit those who had the foresight to make a reservation.
This was annoying because the waiters had just been served a nice employee meal in the back bar – aka the ‘J Room’ – and at about a minute past five one of the hot hostesses would pop her head in the room and rattle off all the tables that had already been seated. And tell us to get our butts out there. Thus began a roughly seven-hour stretch of non-stop action which is often described by those in the business as being ‘in the weeds’. And mind you this is before federal and state laws mandated break periods for workers including restaurant personnel.
Soon after starting to wait tables in the evening, I became aware of patterns for Jake’s dinner patrons and their behavior. Early bird diners tended to be seniors who went to bed at eight, rubes who didn’t get out much, and dweebs who wanted to beat the rush.
None of those people tipped well, although I should add that many of them were really nice and a pleasure to wait on. The same cannot be said for many of the prime-time diners who were the city’s glitterati, fashionable folks who wanted to be seen on the scene, and occasionally A, B, or C-list celebrities. Many of them tipped well but could be a colossal pain in the ass.
Night owl diners were mostly drunks who’d been in the bar for two hours or more waiting for a table. They either tipped really well because they were drunk and couldn’t do the math, or not at all because they were drunk and forgot.
The welcome exception at the night’s last turn were fellow restaurant workers who got off early enough to make the final seating at 10 or 11 on Fridays and Saturdays. These folks were of course easy to wait on and over-tipped, which compensated for working into the wee hours of the morning.
Early on in my dinner career, I became aware that the majority owner, Bill, and his partner, Doug, were concerned about the new kid’s ability to live up to the lofty standards of a Jake’s waiter and were keeping a close eye on me.
Generally this meant Doug, who sat in my section several times I assumed not by accident. Bill also was seated at one of my tables from time to time, but because he’d been in the bar since lunch he was hammered and therefore less critical of my service. And he tipped much better. After receiving one stern lecture from Doug about keeping water glasses full and a few grudging compliments, I was deemed up to the task. The fact that I couldn’t grow a handlebar mustache like almost every other waiter was evidently not held against me.
Bill, on the other hand, treated my probationary period as an opportunity to subject me to fraternity house hazing.
Taking an order from him was challenging enough because to begin with he spoke with a thick Boston accent, but after he’d had a few drinks, which was every night, his verbal communication skills were so diminished he was capable only of unintelligible growls and riotous laughter. I had to rely on veteran waiters to translate this strange dialect. More challenging were his sporadic attempts to distract me from my job.
The most notable occasion being the night I was taking an order from a table of six by the front windows and Bill, who was out on the sidewalk with his friend Dennis after being thrown out of his own restaurant by the general manager, decided to drop trou and moon me with his ample and hairy butt cheeks. My resolve to ignore the spectacle and continue with the order quickly collapsed and I was forced to introduce my guests to the owner’s ass.
It's impossible to ignore the statement in the last paragraph about Bill being shown the door of his own joint by the general manager and it’s the perfect prologue to an introduction to the inimitable Bob. I briefly described our ‘interview’ if you can call it that in a previous episode, but it wasn’t until I started working nights when Bob helmed the front desk that I understood what really made Jake’s Famous Crawfish the place to be – for me, the entire staff, and hundreds of patrons every night – was him.
I’ve mentioned his toothy smile and bushy black hair and mustache, but to complete the picture, Bob was not too tall and slight of build. He walked fast using an almost clownish strut, legs akimbo and feet pointed out with shoulders keeping cadence, yet somehow it came across as dignified.
His entire body vibrated with energy, and he seemed to be everywhere all the time yet always exactly where he needed to be. He was preternaturally calm in the face of tremendous pressure and never lost his cool, no matter how busy the dining room. Bob was the consummate host, and the embodiment of hospitality.
He was the GM at Jake’s throughout my three years on the floor there. After I left, he would go on to manage the venerable grande dame of Portland, the Benson Hotel, and later held court as the GM of the exclusive University Club. But I can honestly say that the time I spent under his supervision and tutelage was integral to my coming of age and stuck with me as an example of how to treat employees once I had my own. Bob expected us to maintain the highest standards of service and would graciously point it out whenever we failed to do so, but every single night I worked he would somehow catch me doing something right and thank me.
It would be difficult to find time and space to adequately describe the staff at Jake’s, and frankly impossible because the ravages of time have left me with an incomplete memory.
When I started, the kitchen was ruled with an iron fist by a woman, which was rare in those days, named Jamella, assisted by her life partner and Pastry Chef, Nancy. Chef Jamella was a no-nonsense individual who wouldn’t take shit from anyone except Bill and Doug, and then only in small portions. Even the most hard-boiled waiters would check their egos and attitudes at the door when she was on the line. When she wasn’t, the atmosphere in the kitchen was raucous and ribald with profanity-laced tirades traded at the pass-through window.
The approximately twenty waiters were a motley crew, all sharply dressed in starched white jackets and white shirts with black bowties, black pants and black shoes, most of whom presented a facade of decorum and professionalism which belied their true debauched nature.
Some of my colleagues will take a star turn in coming episodes, but for now let me just say about the entire group that I was at once honored, amused, edified, and horrified by what I witnessed on the floor, and off, over the next three years.
Labor laws and enforcement have changed considerably since the late ‘70s, but at the time it was perfectly acceptable to have a stable of waiters which were all male. It stands to reason then, that the cocktail servers were all females. The staff was prima facie evidence that the blatant sexism of such an arrangement was not considered un-PC at the time.
And at the risk of sounding blatantly sexist myself, let me tell you the cocktail waitresses were without exception hot and a pleasure to work with. The bartenders, again all men, were not especially hot and not all a pleasure to work with, but for the most part very professional and to my mind possessed of superhuman strength, dexterity, memory, and patience with the crushing crowd of bar patrons who were usually lubed up and hard to handle.
That’s not everything that’s Jake, but for now I hope gives you a sense of the barely controlled mayhem into which I’d been thrown like the proverbial cat in a bathtub, and also a brief but helpful introduction to my fellow cats. There are so many funny stories to share about those years it would be difficult to edit any out, so rest assured you will have the opportunity to relive moments of truth truly being stranger than fiction.