Adrienne Green: How did you get into the restaurant industry?

Marie Billiel: I'm originally from a very small town called Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, which is basically in the woods. It has fewer than 2,000 people, and so there are not really a ton of options for part-time work as a high schooler. When I was 15, I started dishwashing at a local restaurant where my boyfriend’s mother works. That was pretty short-lived simply because I was just in school and the hours were long and late for a 15-year-old.

After that, I worked in a local health-food grocery store; we had a deli where we made sandwiches. That gave me a lot of experience working with food and also working with the public and from then to go into serving just made sense.

Green: Where was your first serving job?

Billiel: My first official serving job was at a 99 Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which is a chain similar to Applebee’s. I was terrible. In corporate restaurants, they’re very specific about how they want things done and exactly what you should say. I understand that for branding, but it puts a damper on developing client relationships. With that said, I was also only 18 and hadn’t really served before. I did not have any finesse and hadn’t developed my own kind of charm in order to make tips and be able to develop those relationships with customers.

They over-hired because it was a grand opening, with the assumption that people would leave. When not many servers ended up leaving voluntarily, I was definitely on the list of ones they were trying to push out; they were giving me only about one day a week.

Green: How did you get the job that you have now?

Billiel: I decided to continue serving and got a new serving job because I wasn’t ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. From there I went to a 24-hour diner in Hadley, Massachusetts, and I was also in college. It gave me a lot more flexibility in terms of shifts I could work.

I worked overnight shifts there when I first started. It was a five-college town—University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith College, Amherst College, and Hampshire College all right there. The weekend overnights were pretty crazy. We had a lot of drunk college students, a lot of really big parties, the fraternities and sororities. Working overnight shifts in that kind of setting is really its own kind of grind. It’s different than bartending, but we certainly had our fair share of inebriated college students.

I remember while I was training, a group of probably nine people came in with one girl who was basically passed out. She had her arms over the shoulders of two friends who were bringing her in. My manager stopped them and said, “Is she drunk?”—like, demanded to know. They sort of sheepishly were like, “Yes.” I thought he wasn’t going to let them come in, but instead he said, “Well, if she throws up, you’re cleaning it up.” They were like, “Okay.” She did, in fact, throw up on the table and she just sort of lay there sobbing, and they were reaching over her grabbing french fries. It absolutely blew my mind.