Hail to the Front-of-House Lifer

Every restaurant has that one server who has been there since the dawn of time—when credit cards were processed with a click-clack across a knuckle buster of a machine instead of a simple tap or swipe on a handheld device. When I waited tables at the now-shuttered Black Eyed Pea in Houston, that server was Connie. She could answer any question or solve any problem, and we trusted her, despite her unnerving habit of...