Online Class: Waiter and Waitress Training 101

Course Lessons

• Lesson 1: So, You Want to Be a Waiter?

  Becoming a waitress or a waiter is often as much an accident as it is a choice. Because most positions are on-the-job training, usually all that is required is an opening and a person to fill that opening.

• Lesson 2: The Serving Staff

  As a waitress looking for a job, you have a fair idea about the questions that will be asked during your interview and how to respond to them. What we will do now is turn the tables on you.

• Lesson 3: Types of Service and Table Settings

  Restaurants are categorized into three basic types: Fine, Bistro/Trattoria, and Family Style.

• Lesson 4: Table Service

  Contrary to the average American's understanding, table service is much more than food being brought to your table for a "sit down" meal.

• Lesson 5: Taking Orders

  Every establishment has a specific protocol for taking orders from the table and giving them to the kitchen and assembly areas. A new server needs to learn this protocol as quickly as possible in order to be an efficient team member.

• Lesson 6: Suggestions and Suggestive Selling

  As mentioned earlier in the lessons, one of your jobs as a server is to be a salesperson. You are in the business of selling food and service, and the more you sell, the higher the check at the end of the night.

• Lesson 7: Special Situations

  Servers who intend to make a good living become students of human nature. Learning to read people is a skill anyone can learn.

• Lesson 8: Other Duties

  Side work duties are time consuming, yet necessary, to the efficient and smooth running of any restaurant. Most people are assigned specific duties so that no one waitress is responsible for every side duty that is necessary.

• Lesson 9: Beverage Service

  For waiters and waitresses who work in such an establishment, your tip can easily be doubled when your party orders alcohol.

• Lesson 10: Team Work

  Part of an effective establishment is the development of true teamwork and team spirit.

• Lesson 11: Sanitation and Food Safety

  Accidents happen anywhere, anytime. Your job, when you work in a restaurant situation, is to try to make sure that accidents have less of a chance of actually happening.