Independent
DC waitress reveals Trump team was tight-fisted with tips and exhausting to serve
A DC waitress has revealed that a range of Trump officials and supporters “were exhausting, impossible, often stingy … and memorable,” to wait on.
Writing for Slate, the waitress, who worked in a fine dining DC restaurant during the Trump presidency, said she “felt lucky” when a senior Trump White House official “tipped 18.5 per cent,” after she was interrogated about the origin of the restaurant’s caviar selection and didn’t have a clear-cut answer.
The waitress said “business plunged” as Obama officials left town and that as Trump supporters started visiting DC eateries “the experience was painful for all”.
Baseball hats violated the dress code, so Trump supporters who wore them started their meal with a “persecution complex”. To avoid bad or no tips, the waitress would “send them little comps,” free little extras throughout the meal, but they would still “tip less than 18 or even 15 per cent,” the waitress writes.
She said that she knew one prolific Republican “wasn’t a real Trumpist,” because he was a “reliable tipper,” took 15 seconds to order and didn’t “make you ‘work for it'”.
The waitress writes that a “great displeasure” seemed to envelop a Trump cabinet secretary as she approached his table, that he ordered the cheapest wine and “didn’t tip more than 14 per cent, no matter how often you topped him off without charging”.
Another Trump cabinet secretary was “a paragon of superficial graciousness” but according to the waitress she didn’t tip enough to make up for the “two or three tables that would ask to move if she was seated near them”.
A former Trump campaign official came in under a fake name for an “inexplicably awkward” dinner, tipped 25 per cent, and was never seen again. The waitress writes that he “obviously knew how to act,” since he was a “creature of Washington”.
Another “awkward” meal was had because of a cabinet secretary’s wife and her “many dietary restrictions,” the waitress said and added that she got the guidance to give free grilled calamari to the “newly broke Secret Service agents, who would otherwise sit for hours nursing no more than a Coke or a cup of coffee”.