The Waiter

Matias Faldbakken

The Hills is a grand old-school European-style restaurant in Oslo, Norway. Both the café itself and the waiter of the title are throw-back to a more elegant and refined time — even if they’re also becoming a bit rough around the edges.

Our hero is the Waiter, a man who takes himself — and his role as a server — quite seriously: ‘It’s all about eating in here, and I’m a facilitator.’ The ritual of the dining room, his white canvas jacket; these are his shields against the unpredictability and crassness of modern life. Within the walls of The Hills, at least, there can be dignity. Conversations are held to an appropriate murmur, a piano player plinks away on the mezzanine, the cheese course always precedes dessert and follows the mains.

The Waiter is surrounded by his co-workers who are only referenced by their titles — the Chef, the Maitre D’, the Bartender — never their names. There’s also a corps of regulars with, as we soon learn, more money than manners. Each lunch and dinner unfolds much like the last until the day an unexpected female guest — ‘She looks like debauchery dressed as asceticism.’ — invades the Waiter’s domain and upends everything that’s holding him together.

Although all the action takes place within the confines of the restaurant, a delicious tension builds in the quiet moments and slapstick mishaps. As our Waiter begins to short-circuit in the wake of his disrupted routine, we’re treated to his chatty and far-ranging (and somewhat neurotic) internal monologue. It’s an entertaining peek into his ‘sensitivities’ and snobbery.

Like a Wes Anderson film turned into a book, this story partially camouflages its warm heart with smooth style and charm. When the chinks begin to show in the Waiter’s defenses, it’s surprising and delightful — a wry look at the insults and absurdities that life serves to all of us.

The morning, as we all know, belongs to coffee. Regardless of the ripple effects that coffee production and motoring have, it’s hard to imagine a life without the two, ideally in combination, and preferably in the morning. The activities of slurping coffee and driving cars are, in one’s very chromosomes, linked to the idea of getting pumped up and underway… Doing away with one of these is like amputating a limb from the body of society: it’s completely out of the question. — Matias Faldbakken

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