On being 18 at a Michelin-starred restaurant, the year I learned to become a version of myself the room could accept.

I was 18 when I got a job at Wallsé, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the West Village. I had been on welfare with my godmother, who had been my guardian since my mother died when I was 7. I did not know who Lou Reed was.

That was the year I got fluent in code-switching.

The Girl Friday role

I was not hired as a hostess. I was hired to assist the controller. But she called me a Girl Friday, which was another way of saying I did whatever needed doing.

I picked up coffee and lunch for the office.

I babysat Chef Kurt Gutenbrunner’s daughters.

I filed invoices. I learned QuickBooks well enough to run accounts payable. I answered phones. I used OpenTable to book reservations. I folded napkins. I polished silverware.

Sometimes Chef Kurt would drive to the farmers market in Union Square and I would come along. He would double-park the Cayenne S and ask me to sit in the driver’s seat while he ran in for produce. He had asked me once if I had my license. I did. He said if a cop came by, drive the car around the block until he got back.

I sat in the driver’s seat with my hands on the wheel. It was the most expensive car I had ever been inside. There was no version of me who was pulling that Porsche away from the curb. I was too scared. I was not the kid who was ready to joyride.

I remember thinking, how did I get here.

I did not have language for the answer yet. I just knew I was somewhere I had not been supposed to go.

The night the hostess no-showed

Aldo was the sommelier at Wallsé. He was covering the manager role while they were hiring a new one. What he really wanted was to focus on wine. He was kind to me from the beginning, and I think about it a lot now, because I was a young girl from a completely different world than his and than the restaurant’s.

One afternoon the hostess called out for that evening. I was already at Wallsé doing office work. Aldo said, “Can you cover?”

I said yes.

He handed me petty cash and sent me out to buy clothes for dinner service. I came back and worked the double. For most of the first night he told me to stand at the door and greet people, and he would seat them. Then he had me do it a second time. Then he had me train with a more senior hostess.

That became my role on weekends. Slow nights, I hostessed. Busy nights, I ran coat check.

I was 18 years old, seeing the nightlife of the West Village from the inside for the first time. Some nights the older staff snuck me into clubs like APT after service. That is a story for another piece.

Learning what the room rewarded

The senior hostesses were blonde. They wore heels. They were sweet, and they were treated a specific way by the customers.

I was not.

So I watched, and I learned.

I slowed down how I spoke. I cleaned up my Brooklyn accent. I changed the octave of my voice, making it higher. I pulled my hair back and gelled it down.

I stopped being the version of me my friends knew.

I became a version the room could accept.

Nobody told me to do any of this. I did it because I was watching what the room rewarded, and I was making sure I was rewarded too.

I called it professional.

I called it growing up.

I called it classy.

I would not learn to call it code-switching for another ten years.

The $100 tip

One busy night a walk-in came in and wanted a table. There were none open. He handed me a folded $100 bill.

I would have tried to seat him anyway. That was just how I operated. But he had greased the palm, as people used to say, because he thought that was how it worked.

Aldo asked me later why the guy tipped me and not him. I told him the guy probably saw me first at the door and assumed I was the one to get him the table. Which I was.

I felt seen for a second. Like someone thought I had power.

I also did not fully understand what had just happened. I was 18. I did not understand the concept of spending hundreds of dollars on a meal. The fanciest dinner I had ever been to was Peter Luger’s for a family member’s graduation.

Being trusted with power I did not understand was one of the first feelings the code-switching gave me. And I liked it.

That is the part worth naming.

“It’s Leo”

One night the phone rang and a man said, “It’s Leo.”

I said, “Okay Leo, how can I help you?”

He wanted delivery. I told him we did not offer delivery. He asked for Aldo.

Aldo took the phone. When he hung up, he was laughing.

He said, “Do you know who you were just talking to?”

I said no.

He said, “We do this for him.”

A few nights later Leonardo DiCaprio came in with his girlfriend Gisele Bundchen. That was how I learned who he was.

I saw Stephanie Seymour and her husband. I held the door open for Elton John as he walked in. That was the first and only time in my life I have been starstruck. He had an essence. He was so polite.

Zac Posen came in all the time.

There were so many famous people that year. I did not recognize most of them until someone told me. What I learned was not their faces. What I learned was who they were to the room.

Some people caused a table to be moved. Some people caused a table to be brought out of storage.

Lou Reed came often. His wife Laurie sometimes came with him. Sometimes Julian Schnabel came too, whose paintings hung in the dining room. Lou always drank a Diet Coke. The chef would make him a salad much larger than the usual portion.

A few months later I started at WD-50 as a bookkeeper by day and hostess by night. Lou came in there too, and asked for a salad.

Wylie Dufresne said no.

At Wallsé we catered to celebrities.

At WD-50 you got what was on the menu.

I have thought about that difference for twenty years. Whose voice wins in a room. Which cultures build themselves around the customer, and which build themselves around the work. Both are legitimate. Both cost something.

What code-switching gave me and what it took

I do not think code-switching is bad.

I think it is intelligent adaptation to a real thing. Rooms have rules. Rooms have rewards. You learn what the rules and rewards are, or you stay outside the room.

At 18, I needed the room. I had been on welfare a year earlier. Wallsé was not just a job. It was a doorway to a different life, and I walked through it by becoming the version of me the doorway required.

The version I became worked. She got promoted. She got tipped $100. She got taken under the wing of a kind man who did not have to be kind. She got trusted with the chef’s Porsche and his daughters.

She also spent the next twenty years wondering why the version of herself that made all of this possible did not feel like hers.

That is what code-switching costs, when you learn it before you have language for it.

You get the room, and you lose track of who was in the room without the code.

I think a lot of women who learned to code-switch early are still doing it in rooms where nobody would notice if they stopped.

Some of them stopped calling it code-switching. They started calling it how I am at work.

That is the part worth sitting with.

A question to sit with

What did you learn to become at work that started as a strategy and became your default?

Not to fix it. Just to name it.

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Read next: The Difference Between Ambition and Survival — the companion piece that unpacks the framework this story sits inside.

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