This has been the professional title of the man who waits upon clients in a restaurant since the mid-seventeenth century. It replaced the earlier term ‘drawer’. Mr Narindar Saroop, writing to the Times (3 June 1988) about the difficulty of...

De Quincey, in his Autobiographic Sketches (1854) remarks that ‘social changes in London have introduced a new word—viz. waitress, which word, twenty-five years back, would have been simply ludicrous’. The word is certainly no longer...

Waiting staff, wait staff, or waitstaff[1] are those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers — supplying them with food and drink as requested. Traditionally, a male waiting tables is called a "waiter" and a female a "waitress." Some...