"Watch it, clumsy! This suit costs more than your whole year!"
The bread basket hit the floor first. Then two full water glasses slid off my tray and shattered beside the booth, ice skidding under the table. He shoved the whole tray off my arm with the back of his hand.
Day 3 undercover.
I'm Ray Castillo, fifty. I own Castillo's: eighteen steakhouses in Arizona and Nevada. My grandfather opened the first one with six tables. Every year I spend a week waiting tables under my middle name. I'd rather hear the truth from a dining room than from a report.
My daughter Nina is twenty-seven. She works in marketing and uses her mother's last name at work, because she wanted to earn everything herself. Her boss, Spencer Doyle, had been chasing our company's account for months. He finally got a dinner meeting with Ray Castillo at our flagship. He brought Nina along to take notes. He had no idea whose daughter she was.
I knew all about him. Nina had told me he sent her for his coffee and called her "sweetheart" in meetings. My plan was to serve their table myself, then sit down with dessert and introduce myself. She had gone to the restroom when I came over.
He snapped his fingers at me twice. I brought the bread and water. His cuff brushed a wet glass, and he did it.
Tomas, our busser, was already on his knees with a towel, picking glass out of the carpet.
I said, "My apologies, sir. I'll bring fresh bread and water."
At exactly eight, his phone lit up on the tablecloth. Nina had just come back. She picked it up to hand it to him, saw the screen, and froze.
"Your meeting reminder has his photo. Spencer… that's Ray Castillo. My dad."
Spencer laughed. Then he saw her face, and he took the phone out of her hand.
My assistant schedules a reminder for every dinner meeting I take, with my picture attached, so nobody walks past me at the door. That night it did its job. The man in the photo was standing next to his table, holding an empty tray.
"Dad?" Nina said. "Why are you wearing an apron?"
Spencer looked from her to me. "Dad," he repeated, very quietly.
"Nina Ellison," I said. "Her mother's name. She wanted to be hired on her own. She was."
My grandfather taught me one thing about business before he taught me anything about steak. Watch how a man treats the person carrying his plate. That's why I meet people as their waiter first. Most of them pass. They never even find out there was a test.
Spencer stood up and apologized. He asked if we could start over. He said the presentation was in his bag. I asked him to sit down.
Then I did my job. Fresh bread, fresh water, and his ribeye, medium rare, exactly as he ordered it. After that I took off the apron and sat down across from him.
I told him the account was not going to his agency. Not because of the glasses. Because of the coffee runs, the finger snapping and "sweetheart."
Nina was angry with me in the car, and she had a right to be. She said I had turned her job into my test. I told her she was right and that I was sorry. Then she told me something she hadn't said before. She had already been offered a job at another agency, and she had been too scared to leave.
She took it that Monday.
Spencer had to explain the lost account to his own CEO. The CEO asked around. Three other young women on his team told the same story about the coffee and the nickname. A month later Spencer was let go.
Tomas came to this country at nineteen. English is his third language, and he had been saving for culinary school for four years. Castillo's paid for it. He cooks on the line at our flagship now, and he plates every ribeye like it's going to a king.
Two years later Nina opened her own small agency. I asked to be her first client. She refused. Her first client was a taco truck on Seventh Street. I eat there every Thursday.
Every year, during my undercover week, Nina comes in once as a regular customer. She orders the ribeye, tips me exactly twenty percent, and leaves a note under the glass. "Watch the water."
Should I have told Nina I'd be her waiter, or was it fair to let her see who her boss really was?
