Waiters

Casa Frida's neighborhood -- the part of Maywood where the Los Angeles River passes through the rail yards -- used to be a dreary stretch of auto parts shops and funky taquerias. It was the last place you'd look for a restaurant offering "a new direction in fine Mexican dining," as Casa Frida's menu describes it.

If you didn't know any better, you might think the trouble began when a beloved, bespectacled waiter named Gilberto got fired. But in truth, the storm over this antique French eatery had been gathering for years. Maybe the fracas was inevitable. How could Galatoire's, a last bastion of French Quarter gentility, expect to slip gracefully into another century? When machine cubes took the place of hand-chipped ice, the clientele griped. When the dress code weakened, they groused.

After lounging around with buddies for a couple of hours in one of Koreatown's booming nightclubs, Teddy Lee got impatient. He flagged down a waiter and told him, "Hey, try to bring that girl over, the one in the white dress." Ten minutes passed, and voila, said girl arrived at his table.

Adding a splash of wine to your pasta sauce is fairly common. But for something different, try vodka. Here, vodka lends a flourish to a tomato sauce rich with cream and mascarpone cheese. A simple salad of butter lettuce and peppery radishes complements the dish. Don't forget a crusty loaf of bread to serve alongside. * Place mats, napkins, silverware and dishes from Crate & Barrel stores.

At the Radnicka cafe, tucked inside Bratislava's medieval City Hall, waiter Frantisek Toth might have to ask three or four times what kind of coffee you'd like. Anywhere else, a customer might get aggravated and leave. Here, almost nobody does--not after an encounter with the smiling Toth and his sincere apologies. Dealing with people like Toth, one of the cafe's five waiters with mental retardation or severe learning disabilities, is a new experience for most Slovaks. Until the fall of communism in 1989, disabled people were usually shut away in state institutions.

Restaurant owners may be facing a tab that will set them back a bit. The Internal Revenue Service wants restaurants to pay the 7.65% Social Security tax on the wages, including tips, that are paid to their waiters and bartenders. The tax collectors rely on credit card receipts to figure how much the waiters are receiving. But the restaurant owners prefer to rely on notably unreliable reports from the waiters themselves.

It was a Saturday night at Green Field, a new Brazilian churrascaria in Long Beach, and four of us were sipping caipirinha cocktails by an artificial wall of water in the foyer. The dining room was jammed and we were waiting for a table. Nothing unusual in this picture, eh? Except that Green Field is a huge ski lodge-style building with room for more than 300 diners. We thought back to some other restaurants that tried their luck in this building.

Miguel Aguilar, Banquet Waiter Miguel Aguilar, 35, earned $28,000 to $30,000 a year as a banquet waiter at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Universal City. He has been out of work since early November. * I started working at the Sheraton Universal eight years ago. I've driven a shuttle bus, I've been a cook and a busboy. But being a server is really the best job. The atmosphere is better than back of the house. It's clean. There are tips.

The Seal Beach Sun reports that police received a call from a worried resident who said three males "wearing aprons had been running around his home with flashlights for the past 10 minutes." The intruders turned out to be waiters from a local restaurant "looking for two juveniles who had failed to pay their bill." I guess that's one way to get waiters to move quickly.

Tired of dealing with the high turnover among their waiters, more and more restaurants are adopting an unusual tactic to raise wages: suggesting the proper tip on the check or automatically adding a surcharge to the bill. Before his restaurant started suggesting the amount to tip, Michael Federici, the manager of Trastevere in Santa Monica, watched waiters leave after two or three weeks on the job. "Our employees were getting stiffed left and right," he said.