Stealing Money from a Hookah Bar Till Is the Easiest Part of the Gig

Welcome back to Restaurant Confessionals, where we talk to the unheard voices of the restaurant industry from both the front-of-house (FOH) and back-of-house (BOH) about what really goes on behind the scenes at your favorite establishments.

“Are you on drugs?”

This was the first line of my interview to join the wait staff at a diner-cum-sheesha bar located on Mile End Road, one of the main arteries into Central London. I went in there because, as you do, I still had a few more resumes in my bag and wasn’t going to waste the money I’d spent printing them off. The first person I met was Ola, a Polish woman who looked like a pixie from an adult fairy story. I told her I naturally have big pupils. She looked disappointed. I got the job three minutes later.

I did the dance where you put your black shirt on and iron your trousers with a damp cloth and showed up for my first shift. When I walked into the lobby, “What Goes Around… Comes Around” by Justin Timberlake was playing. It ended. “Again,” came drifting over a mezzanine area that I hadn’t noticed before. Ola replayed it.

It turned out that up there—along with an expansive floor filled with sofas and knee-high tables for eating and a prayer room—was Toseef, the co-owner of the place. Toseef was obsessive and demanded that the songs he liked got replayed six times, regardless of what customers thought. He would walk over, look you straight in the eyes, and repeat lines from them—I was ready / to give you my name—and then ask what you thought. Five nights in a row, he played Gladiator from a projection screen pulled down at the far end of the restaurant. By the end, he was skipping through what he envisaged to be its most important moments.

His business partner, Tariq, did not have the gift of timing. I always seemed to show up when things were about to fall apart. Tariq had just bought a pizza oven for the cost of a mid-range Porsche. When he first met me, he said “Hi,” like I was an annoying distraction from gazing at the pizza oven. I’m afraid to admit to all the bosses out there: your wait staff—with their paltry minimum-wage paychecks—can smell when the boss is inattentive.

I never told Faisal or Nathan, two tall Lebanese co-workers, that I was stealing from the till. As it turns out, I discovered that we all had our specific techniques for ‘maximising’ the till a few years later as we all collapsed in giggles. Nathan messed up food orders and cleared them off the system via the back door. Meanwhile, Faisal had been entrusted with a more senior position on the floor, an obvious advantage when it came to the till. I was the guy who was always listening for when an ingredient ran out in the kitchen like a little survivalist rodent and someone needed to pop over to the supermarket to buy more. Obviously, £20 or £40 from the till comes back from the store with the same receipt…

Tariq would deduct our taxes and say, “Here’s how much tax I think you owe this month,” and hand us cash. I never received a single piece of paper more sophisticated than an envelope from him. It was a give and take relationship. One of my favourite moments of my life was when Tariq returned from a shopping expedition to show us in a staff meeting that the till now had a security camera fixed on it the whole time. Except that Tariq had clearly weighed the options and bought the kind of security camera you would buy for your child if they said they wanted to play make-believe policeman. It was white, plastic, and had a red flashing light on top.

Give and take eventually came for Tariq in a way that he didn’t deserve. He was fucking Ola in the prayer room. I can still hear her saying Tahhhh-rek, when she was displeased. Anyway, one day I disturbed them in there when I was opening up. Tariq eventually came down and checked the post and discovered that a no smoking indoors ban had been passed. “That won’t include sheesha,” he said. Yes Tariq. “People mainly come here for the food anyways.” Yes Tariq. Without the sheesha, it was just that giant oven in the place. He started looking at it like he wondered if he could fit inside it.

The place is gone now, replaced by some blah corporate coffee chain. Every time I go past it, I get a knot in my stomach from stealing from the till, about Ola, and the smell of apples hollowed out in a room the size of a broom closet filled with the woody gunge of flavoured tobacco.