Mining for waitressing tips at Haskell’s Prospector

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

“Come on in, anywhere that’s clean,” growls Linda Prichett—sort of—in a way that fits her still-red-in-her-sixties hairdo and somehow translates as a friendly greeting at Haskell’s Prospector.

That wouldn’t work where I wait tables, I’m thinking, stepping inside the locally legendary steakhouse. Every time I’m here (mostly at night, when the restaurant/bar transitions into a music venue), it feels as though I’m walking into an old Western movie.

I’m forever comparing my restaurant to other places when I go out to eat. And like most waitresses, I’m never really off-duty. So I stack plates and move things around on the tabletop. I don’t complain if something’s wrong. And no matter what happens, I give the server a 20-percent tip. I know what it’s like to do this kind of work.

Not the way Linda does, of course. She’s been serving chicken-fried steaks and no-nonsense drinks to the Prospector’s unique mix of wrinkly regulars and ironic young things for 25 years. She had mastered the art of carrying eight salad plates before I could hold a spoon.

Linda’s greeting hangs in the air as I pick out a table, but she has all but vanished into a ruby-black blur among the booths of brown vinyl and bull-horn décor. (It’s been a decade since California banned indoor smoking, but it’s easy to picture the room filled with clouds of smoke—if these walls could talk, they would probably cough.)

I’m here today because I’m interested in what Linda has to say. She agrees to sit down with me—to talk shop and swap server secrets—after she finishes her shift (and her “side work,” server lingo for the parts of our job you don’t see—filling ketchup bottles, folding napkins, slicing lemons).

“So, you’re a waitress then,” she starts enthusiastically. When I note that I’m a writer, too, it doesn’t seem to matter much—except: “And this will get the kids in here, right?”

Linda is practical like that—and her waitressing reflects it. Actually, her character and choice of profession are one and the same. She came to the Prospector in the early 1980s after her husband passed away and she had to find a way to support her three teenaged children.

“Mrs. Haskell hired me,” Linda recalls. “I had never had any experience before, but she liked the way I dressed and that I always had my hair done nice, so she said she’d train me. But, my first day on, Mrs. Haskell had a headache, and I was just sort of thrown into it.”

To understand Linda is to understand the Prospector—and to appreciate how perfectly the characters of waitress and restaurant can coincide. Mr. and Mrs. Bobby Haskell opened the place in 1965, almost 20 years before Linda arrived. But she got the hang of things pretty quickly, even the Prospector’s strange little idiosyncrasies. Linda learned how to maneuver in and out of a kitchen door—hands full of soup, salad and porcelain—that didn’t swing open, but instead required her to turn a knob every time.

She quickly developed a knack for handling the customers, too. When somebody would get a little difficult, she’d try to kill them with kindness—what she calls “Splenda tactics,” being sweet and accommodating. When that wouldn’t work, she’d simply turn them over to a different server.

“One guy said he didn’t like my attitude,” she remembers, throwing up her hands. “I just gave that table to a different girl. You just try to give them what they want, but that doesn’t always work. Some people. You sure remember the mean ones.”

The Haskells eventually sold the Prospector to Luis Lemus, who had started working in the kitchen in 1978. He still owns the place. Lemus acknowledges that he hasn’t made many changes, explaining that “people like it the way it is.”

But some things have changed, anyway, and those small adjustments are what have enabled the Prospector to accommodate a new generation of customers without alienating the old ones.

Linda remembers when the entertainment used to be an old-fashioned piano bar, a relic first replaced solely by karaoke—later, as live shows increased, the Prospector became what most in the under-50 crowd recognize it for today: an integral part of Long Beach’s arts-and-music scene. Those shows bring “the kids who try to get a side of potatoes before the kitchen closes,” Linda notes. She generally tries to get out before the bar fills up with them—and their music.

“I’m second off, so I don’t usually have to listen to it,” she reports with typical straightforwardness, although it’s not an insult—it’s just not her kind of music. “It’s not rock & roll. It’s not head-banging music,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t know what it is.”

Other changes are beginning to show, too.

“I’ve got weak wrists now,” she says. “I can still carry three or four plates, but it used to be more than that. Now they got all these fancy things on the plates—sides of au jus with the steak, you know.”

That brings up an obvious question, and when I ask it Linda rolls her water-blue eyes halfway around and then looks right at me.

“Everybody’s always asking me, ‘Linda, when are you gonna retire?’ You know, I’m in good shape, I’m still quick and I like having a reason to get up out of bed four times a week, do my hair, put on my shoes and go somewhere. I don’t want to quit because I don’t want to get old.”

Tags: Food, Long Beach, the prospector, waitressing