Walk a mile in a great waiter’s shoes

“So, are we going to keep the chef one more night?” Gomez asks.

“I’d say he earned his keep,” the gentleman says.

“Mmm, delicious,” the lady says.

Gomez has a million of these cymbal-crash jokes, and so do his longtime customers at La Grotta Ristorante Italiano in Buckhead. Their banter is all part of the unspoken code, the reason that La Grotta has managed to thrive for 30 years in the basement of a discreet Buckhead apartment building. The mostly European waiters (all men) know how to serve, and the guests — wealthy, unhurried, trend-averse — know how to dine.

For 20 years Gomez, 55, has bestowed on each table the most mellifluous, lilting “buona sera!” on the planet.

“The new ones ask me what part of Italy I’m from, and I’ll say Sicily,” Gomez admits. “I don’t want to disappoint them.”

He is, in fact, a Spaniard who’s never once set foot on Italian soil. But, like others on La Grotta’s floor staff, he learned the language and mannerisms while working on an Italian cruise ship. He even pronounces his first name with a soft Italian “g” (like Giuliano) rather than an aspirated Spanish “h.”

Gomez — with the blessing of owners Sergio Favalli and Antonio Abizanda — has agreed to let me tail him one Thursday evening, disguised as a waiter in training. I want to see seasoned service professionals at work, and there’s no better place for that than La Grotta. The most senior is Virgilio Martin, 72, who’s been on staff since Day 1 and never once called in sick. The rookie is Shaw Lobi, with a mere 10 years under his belt.

At 7 p.m., the room is just beginning to fill. A 60-ish man in a patterned sports jacket and yellow oxford shirt joins a friend who has been nursing a martini.

“He must be on his third by now,” the man barks upon arrival. “You’d better get me a Rusty Nail quickly to catch up.”

“It’s his fourth,” Gomez quips. “I’ll make it a double.”

“Of course, I’m joking about the double,” he tells me as we beeline to the bar. “We pour nice, stiff drinks here. Don’t measure, just pour.”

Favalli and Abizanda, both veterans of downtown’s Bugatti restaurant, opened La Grotta in 1978 when Northern Italian was in vogue. It meant seafood pasta and mozzarella, but also fine wines and rich linens. It took the mantle from Continental restaurants, and so the genre also came to indicate oversized menus filled with rack of lamb, Dover sole and mashed potatoes piped into swirly rosettes. All of that is still, blessedly, on the roster at La Grotta.

We drop the drinks and assume the attentive waiter stance near Alain Velay. Gomez and Velay, a 55-year-old native of Lyons, France, have been service partners for eight years, and seem to have no chitchat left in them, only tacit teamwork. They’re like the dog and the cat, always mutually aware, never together.

Gomez warmly welcomes regulars and escorts them to the rest of their party. (“This guy says he knows you …”) Now, at 7:30, every table is filled. Chatter drowns out the Chopin ballade playing on the speakers. A table of nine businessmen in suits and ties order an expensive Barolo, and Velay reappears with the bottle in one of his oven-mitt hands and nine balloon wine goblets in the other.

A woman dumps her fur coat in my arms. “You’re not just going to take it but hang it up, too, right?” she asks waggishly.

I have no quick quip. “Yes, ma’am,” I respond feebly.

A table is set for much-loved regulars with their special parmesan cheese cubes and wine already chilling. “The object is — as soon as they come in — to race them to the table with their martinis,” a floor manager says.

By 8, everyone is waiting for their food. This would be a disaster at other restaurants, but not at La Grotta. People drink, nibble their grissini breadsticks and show none of the impatience of so many trend-chasing diners today.

Gomez, a stealth bullet on his feet, rushes through the tight space with two glasses of wine on a bar tray when a customer backs up her chair. He stops short, pirouettes and spills not a drop. A manager takes the wine and serves it.

“That’s the thing,” customer John Crawford says appreciatively. “There are all these people walking around to make sure nothing goes wrong. Of course, it never does.”