These are the dumbest mistakes I've made in the hospitality industry

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: the dumbest mistakes in the hospitality industry.

Never a dull moment when you work in hospitality. Every new job is exciting, but with little experience, I found the hospitality industry genuinely dead and terrifying. You don't want to make mistakes, but you also don't want to show uncertainty towards your colleagues, and then you also have to communicate with guests. I often found that last part the scariest: they pay for their drinks, food, and the whole shebang, so if you don't serve a table well, people often really dislike you. At least, that's how it felt for me.

You probably understand already: that pressure at the beginning of my hospitality career... Grotesque! The result: sweaty hands, stuttering at the table, not knowing left from right, and so on. My first hospitality job (about 16 years ago now) was at a fairly high-end restaurant, owned by Herman den Blijker, you probably know him. The service had to be good and correct. Although it was a long time ago, I still remember my beginner's mistakes like it was yesterday. But even during my further career in hospitality, there have been plenty of embarrassing moments, and these are the worst:

The dumbest mistakes I've made in hospitality
1. No one explained to me how to carry multiple plates in one hand/on one arm. They just assumed I knew how; I didn't. The result was that I thought everyone was just really good at balancing (I wasn't) and let the hot plates swing on my arm with tea towels underneath. So. Many. Plates. Broken.

2. At this same restaurant, the chef only explained the dishes outside the menu once. My memory wasn't trained for hospitality yet, so I forgot this after five seconds, but the chef refused to tell me again. Situation: having to tell a business group of twenty that their intermediate dish was a meatball with Harry Koeffers. It wasn't. It was a vegetarian ball (I still don't know the ingredients) and haricot verts.

3. For years, I worked at a brown café near Leidseplein, where tourists mainly ordered pints of beer. I could handle all that, but in the rush, I forgot that there was a step at the door. I literally flew out the door, and the gentleman at the middle table on the rattling full terrace got seven pints of beer spilled on him. Seven. He was not amused.

4. And then you think you've mastered balancing the plates and can smoothly carry three at once to a table. The first one goes well... And then you forget that the fish with butter sauce in your other hand is no longer upright. And you realize this because the lady starts screaming since she now has a full plate of butter sauce in her hair. She was also not amused.

5. Once I started to learn the etiquette a bit, I knew that the first plate should be placed in front of the oldest woman. Can you imagine my blind panic when there was a reasonably large group with all older women? I really didn't know where to start, but it quickly became clear that I had made the wrong choice. If looks could kill...

6. This wasn't even really a blunder, but more a moment where I could really sink into the ground. A well-known Amsterdam criminal who owes his nickname to his big gamble, I had to explain the fish of the day. It was a nose fish. I had to say that De Neus could be served a nose fish. Deathly fear.

7. The mash-up of words: when I'm juggling many things in my head at once, my words sometimes get mixed up. So a guest thanked me for something that was really a small effort, I got tangled up in ‘no problem’ and ‘you're welcome’. Result: ‘No welcome.’

8. This could be in a comedy film: I had to work on Valentine's Day, and the restaurant was nicely decorated romantically. As a newcomer, I was allowed to walk through the conservatory, where mainly couples came for a drink. Lots of bottles (pink) champagne, then. Had I ever opened champagne? No, but how hard could it be? Well, that cork came off easily... But straight against the ceiling and then on the head of a boy. Side note: that evening, the manager told me that it might not be such a good plan for the restaurant and me to be together. I got dumped on Valentine's Day.

Bonus: This wasn't necessarily a blunder for me, but more for him. The husband of a well-known Dutch model came to settle the bill for him and his party. He wanted to pay with his credit card but had shopped quite a bit that day. ‘Do you know if the maximum of Mastercard can be above 20,000 euros?’ I blinked sweetly and answered that if I knew that, I probably wouldn't be working in hospitality five days a week. No, he didn't think so either upon reflection.