Miami Nice : Service Out of Style? Just Ask Emma

Working for pay is the common--and intensely dissimilar--experience of 180 million Americans. Survival depends on it; so do dreams. Here is the first of a series of profiles of workers at their diverse jobs.

There was a time when courtesy counted for something, when the customer was always right and a smile was an umbrella on a rainy day.

It was nice to be important then, but it was more important to be nice. The man at the gas station hurried to clean the windshield because cleanliness was next to godliness and a stitch in time saved nine.

From those days--back, back, back--comes the waitress, Emma Noble, for whom they are waiting in line. “Emma!” some of them call out from the front of the crowd at the Rascal House restaurant and deli. She smiles. They wave.

Wait for Their Favorite

After an hour, you’d think they’d be happy to just sit anywhere, open a menu and nosh on a roll. But no, long as they’ve waited this morning, they’ll wait some more to be served by their favorite waitress.

“Emma,” they tell the hostess, and she understands. These are Emma’s people. Emma knows what they like, down to the flavor of the jelly and the plumpness of the prunes.

Customized Service

With Lou Poster, his heart surgery behind him, Emma knows this is his day for a scrambled egg, not his day for oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. “I only get an egg every fourth day because of the cholesterol,” Lou says.

With Al Schubowsky--very finicky--she knows that when he asks for the corn muffins he wants them with butter, but when he gets the bran muffins that means cream cheese. “I only had to tell her once,” Al says respectfully.

And with Irwin Kann, who is even more finicky than Al, she knows that his stomach turns at the sight of an egg white that is too loose. “And I never have to ask her for more coffee,” he says with satisfaction. “She’s one of those psychies, you know, with ESP.”

Actually, what Emma is is old school. In a nation itching to take this job and shove it, Emma Noble, 66, believes all the old saws: Nobody owes you a living. Honor lies in honest toil. A job worth doing is worth doing well.

The usual complaining that work is a drag and the boss is a creep--Emma does none of that. To her, a job is a second home, a place where people know your name and recognize your face and share the good and the bad and all the rest in between.

Three-quarters of her customers are regulars. “It’s like family,” Emma says of them. “If they miss a day or two, I call their house to see if everything is OK. And if I’m out sick, oh my! The phone rings and rings.”

Yet no one should get the idea that Emma is one of those schmoozers with a new joke each day and a “sweetie” or a “dearie” at the end of every sentence. With her it’s all by the book, straightforward as Robert’s Rules.

“Grits come with the eggs, if you want,” she says.

“No grits, but I’ll take some sliced tomato instead.”

“Grits have nothing to do with tomato,” she answers. “Tomato is extra.”

For 22 years, this slender woman with a schoolmarm’s serious face has worked the morning shift at the Rascal House, one of the Miami area’s busiest restaurants. She waits on the nine front stools at the big oval counter, a Formica domain she patrols with the vigilance of a closed-circuit camera in a downtown bank.

Plenty of Butter

No one runs out of butter at Emma’s station no matter how fast they smear, and the EPA could learn plenty from her about how to get up a spill. By Emma, the same fork never pierces a roast turkey wing that has first touched pickled herring or chopped liver.

New coffee is not poured over old. The cup is first emptied and rinsed with hot water. When she serves a bowl of soup, the plate beneath is never dampened by a spoonful of broth that has slipped over the rim.

“A sloppy saucer I can’t stand,” Emma says.

She always smiles when smiled at and remembers the names of your children and worries what the doctor has to say about your blood pressure. She is as warm and unpretentious as a fresh bagel, dependable as the heartburn from a sliced Bermuda onion.

“Tuesdays, I take home extra rolls for my cleaning lady, and Emma always remembers,” says Pearl Kashenberg. “I mean it. When I’m ready to go, so are those rolls.”

A Fussy Clientele

Emma’s success has not come easily, for the Rascal House has a fussy and sometimes difficult clientele. Most are retirees from the condos near the Collins Avenue strip.

“This is my badge of honor, eating out twice a day,” says Molly Newmark. “For 61 years of marriage, I cooked. Now it’s time somebody else cooked.”

Here, a phrase like “beet borscht with sour cream” is uttered with the same reverence as a lover’s promise. Corned beef is demanded “extra lean,” the threat implied that even a smidgen of fat voids the whole deal.

With so much at stake, Emma has come to expect a little crankiness. “Some of them are nudniks,” she says flatly, “but those are the ones to treat most gently. My mother taught me, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

When she first came to the restaurant, she was a frightened refugee from the marital wars, a divorcee from Cleveland with two young children to support and not much idea how to do it. She picked Miami because she had family here.

She had waited on tables once before, and she figured that she could try it again. A neighbor suggested the Rascal House, where the food was good, the portions legendary and the customers devoted.

But Emma never expected so much to-do. More than 200 people worked at the place. Back in the kitchen, there were 80-gallon drums of split-pea soup and vats of beef stew so big they are stirred with an oar.

Besides, the food was unfamiliar. Emma is Catholic and had never known many Jews. She had never seen lox or a bagel or a matzo ball. To this day, she hasn’t tasted gefilte fish. “I just can’t bring myself to do it,” she apologizes.

And the line! It wound around the corner as if this were a movie theater with the latest from Liz Taylor. Anxious people inched forward like sun-parched nomads shuffling toward an oasis. Occasionally some fainted, then refused help because they didn’t want to lose their places.

This job could be something like a permanent migraine, Emma thought, but she desperately needed work. “Please give me a chance!” she pleaded, and they did. She raced right out to buy a white uniform and a pair of shoes.

From the start, there were daily astonishments and exasperations. What tenacity these customers had! What appetites! What gall!

No Hospital Food

Once, a man sitting at the counter collapsed face down into his broiled halibut. The emergency squad revived him and was about to take him away.

“I’ve had hospital food,” the man said, perking back up. “Wait till I finish eating here.”

The ambulance driver told him either to leave now or forget about it.

“In that case,” he said with a wave of the hand, “I’d just as soon stay.”

Another customer went back north for six months around summertime. When he returned, Emma was sharp enough to remember that he liked soft-boiled eggs. She just couldn’t recall how long they should boil.

“Was that 2 1/2 minutes or three?” she asked.

He was upset. “You mean, you forgot already!” he complained.

Such pressures took effort getting used to, but in time, Emma made her peace with the demands and the routines--even with the people who ate two-thirds of their food only to say:

“It was cold when you brought it.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

Special Treatment

After all, what the customer mostly wants is the same thing Emma wants--to have a place to go, to be treated a little special, to be cared about and to get a chance to care back.

“A job is what you make of it,” she says. “If you use it just to make a living and nothing else, you’ll never get anywhere. Really, you’ll resent it. I made up my mind to enjoy what I do.

“And why not? I think I spend more time here than I do at home. I mean, the time I’m awake. I’ve gotten to know so many beautiful people here. If I wouldn’t work, I wouldn’t know what was going on with them.”

There are simple truths in Emma’s world. Among them: Success may be getting what you want, but happiness is wanting what you get.

“You’ve got to take the bad with the good,” she advises. “Give them a day’s work for a day’s pay. And don’t party all night!”

Lives in Trailer

Emma and her sister live in a trailer home. There are knick-knacks and stuffed animals on every shelf and table. There is a painting of Jesus above Emma’s bed and a five-foot statue of St. Jude off to the side.

In the evenings, the two women unwind in front of the big TV. They sip a Bloody Mary or a Southern Comfort on the rocks. Their favorite programs are reruns of “Happy Days” and “Alice,” that show about waitresses where one of them is always saying, “Kiss my grits!”

“I’d never dreeeeam of saying such a thing!” Emma insists, even if it is an amusing thought.

Each morning the alarm goes off at 4:25, though sometimes she will doze for an extra five minutes. Getting up this early means she is never late. If her car won’t start, there is time to catch a ride.

Her white uniform is always pressed, and she pins a colorful hanky to one shoulder for decoration. She trades off among five pairs of white nursing shoes. The shine is always buffed and the laces laundered.

Doors Open at 7

By 6--6:30 at the latest--she is on the job, laying out the place settings and wiping the counter. The doors don’t open until 7, but the line begins to stretch out 90 minutes before and the customers peep in the windows and wave.

The first ones inside are almost always the same. There is Murray Bergman, who likes only the miniature prune Danish, and Pearl Kashenberg, who doesn’t care if her Danish are prune or cheese except on those days when she has promised the extras to Murray.

There is Margaret Fulop, who begins each morning with a dish of prunes, and Dominick Remedio, who alternates between a scrambled egg and oatmeal.

“How’s my Emma today?” Dominick says.

“Fine, Dominick. A scrambled egg?”

“Thatsa right!”

Hour after hour, each stool fills only seconds after it opens up. There is Al Schweber, the pharmacist, who nourishes himself with the Wheatena because it is loaded with Vitamin E.

There is David Algaze, the aluminum-siding salesman, who eats his grapefruit with a tablespoon because he has a big mouth.

Scolds Customer

And there is Murray Banner, who ought to know better than to light up a cigarette after the doctor told him to lay off.

“Put that out!” Emma scolds him. “We want you around for a while!”

“I love you, Emma.”

“Give me the pack!”

It is a long day, nearly 10 hours on her feet. At noon, metal buckets of pickles and green tomatoes replace the plastic baskets of breakfast rolls on the counter. Some of the regulars are already back for a second meal.

Today, the kitchen is out of the halibut tail, which is a little bit juicier than the other parts. Anne Erstling, disappointed, orders the salmon instead.

And--oh, look at that--there is Gloria Wolfson, her red wig on kind of crooked and a paper napkin slipping off her polka-dot dress.

Lately, her memory is not what it was. She has finished her lox plate and Emma has taken her $10 bill to the register and brought back the change.

Receipt Missing

Now Gloria can’t locate the receipt, and every time she fingers through her pocketbook she gets lost in the old, wrinkled photos of her husband and son.

“I can’t find the receipt,” she says nervously. “They’ll make me pay again.”

“Oh no, come on,” Emma says. “I’ll tell them you paid.”

She takes the older woman by the arm. Gloria is reassured, if still a little confused. She has something very important to say, but can’t quite get it in mind.

Finally, as they walk slowly toward the door, the heart of it comes back to her, summoned from deep down in a lifetime.

“I like nice people,” Gloria says to Emma Noble, her favorite waitress at the Rascal House.

“You’re such a nice person.”