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The waiter handed the menus to us. He had stood upright, his hands folded in front of his chest. He wore a nametag that said BOB.

“I’ll give you some time to look over the menu, of course,” he said, “but I want to tell you that I wouldn’t recommend the beef dish. Most people find it tastes a little too salty.”

When he said the word "salty" he separated his right hand from his left, made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, and extended the other three fingers above the circle. He pushed his hand forward slightly as if adding a period to the end of the last sentence, and he twisted his mouth as if mentioning salt made him taste it.

I knew this guy.

“May I bring either of you a cocktail?” he asked.

My wife ordered a glass of water and I ordered water and a draft beer. He rattled off the names of the three draft beers they served and then told me which of the three he recommended. Most of his customers also preferred it, he said, bouncing up on his toes. I didn’t look at him as he spoke, and I picked one of the other two beers. He nodded at me and left the table.

I looked at my wife.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you recognize our waiter?”

She leaned in.

“Roberto.”

“Noooo,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

“His nametag says Bob, but it’s Roberto.”

Five years before, we’d been traveling in New England, mainly to see the leaves change. At the end of the trip we stayed a few nights in Boston, and on one of those nights we drove outside the city to a restaurant that a friend of ours had recommended. It was a crowded, bustling place, a bar with live music downstairs, the restaurant upstairs. Everything was running behind schedule and we had to wait over half an hour past our reservation time for a table, which seemed longer because it had taken us forty-five minutes to drive there. Things didn’t improve after we were seated. We didn’t see our server for another thirty minutes, though after twenty minutes we’d managed to get water, bread, menus, and a wine list. At long last a waitress appeared, out of breath and apologetic. I ordered a bottle of red wine, one I was familiar with and one of the least expensive choices on their pricey list. Fifteen minutes later she brought the wine to the table, their last bottle, she said, and she’d had trouble finding it. She struggled to remove the cork and then poured some wine in my glass. I tasted it, then asked my wife to try it, then took another sip myself. We agreed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The wine is bad.”

The waitress began whipping her head over one shoulder and then the other, looking for someone she didn’t see. She took the wine away and came back with the list and stood at the table while I picked another bottle. I looked for another inexpensive red wine and quickly chose one that turned out to be fine. As soon as I said the wine was good the waitress asked if we were ready to order. We usually preferred to enjoy the wine first, but we’d already waited so long that we decided to go ahead and tell her what we wanted.

My wife ordered Alaskan king crab legs, and I don’t remember what I ordered. No appetizers, we thought, nothing to delay our big plates of food. By the time our meals got to us it was past ten o’clock and we’d eaten two baskets of bread. We’d been joking that they must have had to call Alaska to get the crab legs delivered. Our stomachs were growling at the food, and we started to dig in. But soon my wife stopped chewing and put her hand over her forehead.

“What is it?”

“The crab legs don’t taste right. I don’t think I can eat them.”

I waved our waitress over and told her about the crab legs. Again her head began its over-the-shoulder searching.

“I’ll get the manager,” she said.

That was when we met Roberto. He stepped to the table, wiry guy, thin mustache, upright, hands folded. He told us his name.

“What seems to be the problem?” he asked.

He must have already heard from the waitress what the problem was, but he wanted it explained to him. My wife told him that the crab legs tasted bad and she wanted to order something else.

“Let me ask you this,” Roberto said. “Have you ever eaten Alaskan king crab legs before?”

“Yes, I have,” my wife said. “They’re one of my favorites, and these are not good crab legs.”

Roberto picked up a fork from a nearby table.

“May I?” he asked, pointing the fork at my wife’s dinner.

She looked surprised, but she leaned back and didn’t say no. He separated a large bite from the shell and put it in his mouth and began smacking it with his mouth open. Standing completely erect, he chewed it thoroughly and swallowed.

“There is nothing wrong with these crab legs,” Roberto said. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and pointed it at us. “The only thing I could say about them is that they are a little salty. They’re salty because we don’t have Alaskan king crab legs in Massachusetts, they have to be flown in from Alaska and salt is used to preserve them. I sometimes get comments about them, but if you eat crab legs in Massachusetts you have to expect them to be a little salty.”

“But we’ve been here for hours,” I said, “and she can’t eat her dinner.”

“I’m sorry you’ve had to wait, but our restaurant is very popular. Many people who come here are highly satisfied with their meals, otherwise we could never do such a good business.”

“We’re from Texas,” my wife told Roberto, “and I’ve eaten Alaskan king crab legs there many times. And they are not this salty in Texas.”

“I happen to be from Texas too,” Roberto said. “I’ve been in the restaurant business for over twenty years, since my first job.”

Leaving the subject of the crab legs, he went on to tell us his employment history, how he’d started as a busboy in a downtown Dallas hotel. We said that we lived in Dallas and that the hotel he spoke of was only a block from a place where my wife once worked. He then named some other restaurant jobs he’d had and said that he missed Texas, but the opportunity arose for him to manage this restaurant in Massachusetts.

I was impressed with his story, but while he told it, my wife and I were not eating.

“Will you please bring my wife another plate of food?” I asked Roberto when he was finished.

“I can bring her another plate of food, of course,” he said, twisting his mouth. “But there’s nothing wrong with the crab legs, and I can’t afford to take them off the bill because your wife ordered food she doesn’t like. If she orders another dinner, please understand that she’ll be charged for two. And by the way, I passed around the bottle of wine you sent back. There were different opinions in the kitchen about whether it was bad or not.”

Roberto rose up on his toes as he told us how it was, his hands folded tightly in front of him, and at the end he made a smacking sound, perhaps because of the remains of the salt.

“Can I have some of yours?” my wife asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

She handed Roberto her plate and we removed our eyes from him. He walked off with the uneaten crab legs.

“If he likes it so much,” my wife said, “he can eat it himself.”

After we ate, it took some time to get the bill and for the waitress to return with our change. I usually pay by credit card, but I didn’t want to trust the restaurant with my name and credit-card number. The waitress left a dollar and some coins in the folder she brought back and that was exactly what I left for a tip.

I was ready to leave, but my wife wanted to go downstairs to the bar and listen to the jazz trio playing there. The idea was to salvage something pleasant from the evening. So we found a small table, ordered drinks, and were starting to enjoy the music when Roberto appeared. He looked around the bar, saw us across the room, and came straight toward us. He slapped the dollar-and-change tip on the tabletop.

“That’s very insulting to our servers,” he said and walked away.

I canceled our drink order, and we left, cursing Roberto all the way back to our hotel and banishing him to our Asshole Hall of Fame.

“Do you think you’ll be able to eat?” my wife asked.

I’d put my menu down.

“Do I want to try to ignore what I’m feeling, to sit here and repeat to myself that he’s a human being who’s trying to make a living? What about you? Can you eat?”

“I can eat. We have no reason to feel bad. He’s in a service business and we’re his customers. If he gives us any trouble, we can tell the manager about our history with him.”

I picked up the menu and looked it over.

A man came to our table with water and then came back with my beer. A few minutes later Roberto walked up, his hands folded again, and asked if he could assist us with the menu.

“You look familiar to me,” I said.

“I’ve been in the restaurant business for twenty-five years, most of it in this area. Perhaps you’ve seen me before.”

“Have you ever worked in a restaurant outside of Boston? In Sudbury?”

His hands came unfolded and he put them behind his back.

“I did work at a restaurant in Sudbury some time ago.”

I named the restaurant, and he nodded.

“You were the manager there, weren’t you? Didn’t you go under the name of Roberto in those days?”

“Yes,” he said, “and I still go by Roberto. I’m a native Texan, but I was offered an excellent job in Sudbury and I took it.”

I kept looking at him as if I expected him to add to his explanation, to tell us why he was here. Instead, he turned to my wife.

“If you’re ready, I can take your order.”

“Are you going to write it down?” she asked.

Roberto pointed to his temple and winked at her. I didn’t know if it was the pointing or the winking that bothered me more.

“I’ll have the beef,” I said. “The one you told us was too salty.”

“Very well,” he said, smacking.

“But don’t add more salt to it.”

“Why would I add salt?”

“People have different points to make and different ways of making them.”

“I’ll have the Alaskan king crab legs,” my wife said. “They’re not too salty, are they?”

“I haven’t had any complaints.”

“The crab legs here are one of my favorites. They’re better than the ones I tried in Sudbury.”

I had the feeling it was coming back to him. He seemed to want to stare at us to help him remember.

“How’s your beer, sir?”

“It’s wonderful.”

“Are you sure you want the beef?”

“Anything that’s on the menu here I expect to be delicious. But if something’s wrong, don’t worry, I’ll let the manager know you warned me about the salt.”

I could see that Roberto’s mind was churning. He seemed hesitant to leave the table.

“Are you sure you can remember it?” I asked, looking in his eyes.

“I remember,” he said.

Read the next installment of Encounters

© 2010 Glen Pourciau