JOB DESCRIPTION (FINAL)

 

Hostess

Working as a hostess in high school was my very first job. When I tell others this, most people chuckle and tell me, “That is a lovely first job!” 

 

When the restaurant hired me, I would have agreed with this response. Free food and talking to guests! What more could I want out of a high school gig? Everyone knows what a hostess is. But do you know what a hostess truly does? If you think you know, I can assure you that you don’t.

A hostess is a woman employed at a restaurant to welcome and seat customers. On a surface level, this definition is correct. But let’s think of a restaurant as a ship. In my opinion, the hostess is not a midshipman, but the captain. Although you may not see it, a hostess runs the entire front of the restaurant from open to close. Yes, our main duty is to welcome and seat customers, but a hostess does more. We navigate the ship in a storm. This is no easy feat.

Three main titles describe the tasks of a hostess:

· Entertainer

· Table Organizer

· Take-Out Girl

With these titles in mind, I am going to use examples of how the captain man’s her ship.

Entertainer

The main goal of the entertainer is to keep waiting guests happy. The restaurant that I worked at did not take reservations—only call ahead tables. If a customer (also known as guests), called before their arrival, they would get a call ahead table. On top of these guests coming into the restaurant, walk-ins come. Essentially, customers enter in waves. The ones that called ahead were sat as soon as possible. I then entertained walk-ins. Almost all the time, all the walk-ins were mad, which makes the job even harder. The most important points of the entertainer are:

· Give walk-ins a proper wait time. Overestimating makes people leave. Underestimating makes people madder.

· Be able to have friendly small talk so that guests are willing to wait. This includes knowing the menu so that people get excited to eat at the restaurant!

Table Organizer

I table organized throughout the entire shift. If the "entertainer" is taking care of waves, table organizing is like steering the ship. Before the restaurant opens, people called ahead for lunch hour. I began my shift setting up tables around the restaurant in a fair pattern amongst the servers (my crew). Then placed parties of guests at the tables. This is an important task because you don’t want servers to get mad at you if they are over or under-served parties. Everyone wants to make money. As the lunch shift moves into the dinner shift, table organizing continued. Dinner time is busier, so the job gets more difficult.

It is also important to note that larger parties sometimes come to the restaurant. This messed up server placements. I had to combine tables, give some servers many small parties, or give only large parties to one server all night. If my crew was making enough money that night, everyone stayed happy. If the crew was happy, customers were happy. How you organize tables can make or break the experience of the entire day.

Take Out Girl

My final task as a hostess at my restaurant was taking to-go orders. Before I begin explaining, let’s summarize everything you may be doing at one time. Take guests to their tables, reorganize the lay-out of the restaurant, help the servers, and finally answer the phone for call ahead tables and to go orders. I will now explain the process of taking the to go orders:

· Answer the phone call

· Fill out a form of what the customer wants on the menu—including any food modifications

· Bring the form to the kitchen and give the customer an appropriate pick-up time

· Make sure that you are giving the right order to the right customer

· Take their payment and give them their food

It is very important that you get to go orders in and out of the restaurant as fast as possible. Think about wanting to throw them overboard. Get them out! These customers take up space in the restaurant and don’t need to be waiting around. To go orders were unnecessary items on the ship.

Conclusion

Now that you know what a hostess does, decide for yourself if you think this would be a “lovely” first job. I learned time management and interpersonal skills. But most importantly that I do not want to work in the restaurant industry when I’m older.

 

Flesch Grade Level: 6

Flesch Reading Ease: 72.7

0% use of passive voice