Stalwart Servers

Conversations with three long-running northern Michigan restaurant workers

By Craig Manning | July 22, 2023

What brings you back to your favorite restaurant time and time again? The obvious answer, of course, is the food itself, while factors like location, ambiance, and affordability factor in, too.

But what about the staff?

There’s something magical about forging a connection with a server or a bartender at a restaurant you love and then becoming one of their regular customers. The inside jokes; the fact that they know your order by heart; their ability to get you an extra scoop of bread pudding when it’s time to order dessert.

Northern Michigan has no shortage of beloved servers who have built long, fulfilling careers out of cultivating lasting relationships with their customers. This week, Northern Express is paying tribute to those folks who, just like the restaurants that employ them, have become Up North food industry institutions.

21 Years and Counting

When Brenda Wright first applied for a waitstaff position at Charlevoix’s Weathervane Restaurant 21 years ago, she was a young mother looking for a job with a flexible schedule and plenty of work-life balance.

“I wanted to be able to attend all my kids’ sporting events,” she says.

Mission (almost) accomplished, on that front: Wright’s kids are now 21 and 17. Her son, Cole, graduated from Charlevoix High School in 2020, where he played as the starting quarterback on the football team; he ultimately signed on to play football at Michigan Tech. Her daughter, Abby, meanwhile, is headed into her senior year and is a standout player on Charlevoix’s volleyball and girls basketball teams, with offers to play at multiple colleges.

To this day, Wright is still committed to not missing a game. Perhaps not coincidentally, she’s also still holding down the job she started more than two decades ago.

These days, Wright is the Weathervane’s lead server, as well as a trusted “second set of eyes” on day-to-day operations for General Manager Paul Andrzejewski. As one of the longest-running employees at the restaurant, she’s worked with or trained hundreds of other servers over the years—something she points to as one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

“Especially in the summertime, we get a lot of college kids working here,” Wright says. “Sometimes, that’s a challenge, because they’re only here for two to three months and they have to learn the whole business.” Despite the hurdles, Wright adds that it’s fun to work with and build friendships with a younger generation of the workforce.

“A couple of my son’s friends work here right now, and it’s fun to work with them, because I’ve known them forever,” she says with a laugh. “I really like getting to know them on a different level. I go from being ‘Mrs. Wright’ to ‘Brenda,’ and our relationship goes from ‘I don’t know what to say around her’ to ‘Oh, we can talk about anything; we’re work buddies now!’”

Part of the Community

For many local servers, that relationship-building aspect of restaurant jobs is what makes the work worth doing. Take Michael Williams, a server-turned-manager at Traverse City’s Amical who moved to northern Michigan from the West Coast nearly a decade ago. While Williams’ husband is a Traverse City local, Williams himself didn’t know a whole lot of people in town when he moved here.

“I’m an introvert by nature,” Williams tells Northern Express, noting that his ideal night is probably spent relaxing at home. But when a job opened at Amical in 2015, Williams decided to apply. He got the gig and began waiting tables during the lunch rush. “It totally got me out of my shell,” he says. “I got to meet so many people and to really become a part of this community by working at Amical.”

It didn’t hurt, Williams adds, that Amical was and is one of downtown Traverse City’s most respected foodie destinations. On a daily basis, he says, he found himself waiting on locals who became important connections or even valued friends: lawyers, realtors, downtown business owners, other workers from the local restaurant community. Soon, this non-local introvert was a familiar face to a whole slew of Traverse Citians.

The Amical connection even helped Williams bond with people he met elsewhere in the community. Everyone, it seemed, had some sort of fond memory of the restaurant, which meant he always had something to talk about with new acquaintances.

“When I tell people I work at Amical, usually the reaction I get is, ‘Oh, that’s one of my favorite restaurants!’” Williams says. “Or sometimes, it’s 'Oh, that place has been there forever! I love it! I’ve been going there since it first opened.’”

Now in an assistant manager role, Williams is excited to be a part of planning Amical’s 30th anniversary celebrations, which will occur next year. When the restaurant turned 25 in 2019, an Amical “Alumni Week” invited past servers, hosts, and cooks back into the fold in a variety of ways. While Williams isn’t sure what the festivities will look like this time around, he’s confident they’ll include similar acknowledgements of the Amical family—and of the fact that restaurants like this one tend to foster long-term employees rather than transient ones.

“It all stems from [owner and founder] Dave Denison,” Williams says of Amical’s employee-friendly reputation. “He’s built a pretty phenomenal thing [with Amical]. It’s a mainstay in the community in part because he’s a great person to work for. When you have somebody like that at the helm, it's really easy to want to stick around. We’ve had servers that are now in the double digits in terms of how many years they’ve been there. We’ve got cooks that have been here forever. One of our dishwashers, we all call him Uncle Phil because he’s been here for over 20 years now. I think Dave just makes it really easy for you to want to stay.”

Meeting the Out-of-Towners

For Heather Chambers, a longtime server at Stafford’s Pier Restaurant in Harbor Springs, one of the most appealing things about working in the restaurant business is getting to be involved in northern Michigan’s bustling tourism economy. Chambers has been in the food service game almost all her life—and at the Pier since 2010—and keeps coming back because of the relationships she gets to build with visitors.

“My mom was in the restaurant industry since I was little, so I was kind of brought up in it,” Chambers says. “I started working in restaurants myself when I was 14, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I love meeting new people and how the job is different every day. But I’ve also built friendships with a lot of customers over the years. There are a lot of people who will ask for me [to wait on them] every time they come to the restaurant, and I’ve also gotten to know a lot of the summer people who have a house here and come up every year, or who will come here in the summer and then come back up during ski season.”

Wright shares Chambers’ fondness for connecting—and reconnecting—with out-of-towners.
“There’s a couple that has a boat here in the summertime, and they have been coming to the Weathervane every single year since my second or third year working here,” she notes. “At the time, their kids had just been born. Last summer, they came into the restaurant and their kids were like 15 and 16. It’s just been so cool watching their boys grow up over the years.”

Sometimes, the clientele at local restaurants even falls into the “famous” category. Over the years, Wright says she’s waited on Tim Allen, spotted former Pistons superstar Bill Laimbeer, and grown close with Kid Rock and his parents, who are long-time Charlevoix residents. While other locals might be starstruck by those encounters, though, Wright says they’re just another unique facet of a job that involves meeting dozens or hundreds of people every day.

“Last year during the Venetian Festival, a band called Sweet Tea Trio was playing locally, and Kid Rock is actually their producer,” Wright says. “I was sitting with his parents, and then he came in and sat next to me. And you would not believe how many people texted me about it. We have a Facebook page called ‘Charlevoix: What’s Happening,’ and there was a photo of us sitting together. People were blowing up my phone and commenting on the post asking, ‘Do you know who you were sitting by last night?!’ One of my girlfriends ended up responding to that post saying ‘Come on, he should feel like the privileged one; he got to sit next to Brenda in downtown Charlevoix!’”