After a year of experience at Il Ristorante Fittizio, I was promoted from the lunch shift to the dinner shift. Shortly thereafter, I began training new servers. When training new staff, I emphasized:
- recognizing the context that appeared to bring a table together (e.g. a date, a family get-together, a business dinner), and matching one's tone to suit that context;
- delivering hot meals promptly, but without appearing to rush;
- managing multiple competing priorities; and,
- affirming wine choices with choice details.
To help new staff with this final task, I developed a short "wine list cheat sheet"--a brief table, fit to a 4"x6" cue card, with key adjectives for each of our six most popular bottles, three red and three white. This cheat sheet is still in use by staff at Il Ristorante Fittizio today.
Through this experience, I learned how to keep the sweat and the stress of the kitchen invisible to front-of-house customers. I also acquired transferable skills such as customer service, sales, and conflict resolution.
If you worked in a restaurant or in another customer-facing role, you might begin by painting a picture of what your specific workplace looked like, and then answer questions such as:
- How many people did you serve on average in a night? In an hour?
- How big was the restaurant? The menu? The average tab?
- Were you ever promoted?
- Did you ever take on any extra responsibilities?
- Did you ever train anyone else?
- What strategies did you use to make sure your customers were happy?
- Why were you good at your job?
Answering these kinds of questions will help you to articulate what kind of impact you had in your role.