The best part about working in the restaurant industry is the food. Seriously. I mean, us service workers have to survive through the dinner rush, understaffing, unruly customers, angry cooks, missing orders, and everything else that could possibly go wrong during a shift. But free meals? They kinda make up for it. When I was a server, the best days were team meetings. We would all gather at the restaurant before it opened (okay, that part wasn’t fun), but the chefs would prepare every dish on the menu for us. These meetings typically happened when we had a seasonal menu change, and we all had to know what the new dishes tasted like in case a customer had any questions. And gladly we did. I was fortunate enough to work at a small family-owned business, where the food was amazing. My work bestie was the food runner, and sometimes she would ‘miscut’ (wink wink) a piece of cake so that it wasn’t presentable enough to serve to a customer, and we’d sneak in the back and finish it before anyone caught onto our scheme. Restaurants can be high-stress for sure, but working in the industry will create some of the best memories. Even if they are bad memories, they’re all funny memories in time. Except for that one regular. We don’t talk about him.