A waitress at Roberta’s in Bushwick said farewell to the eatery on Friday by doing her shift almost naked. Twitter user @VickyOyomba tweeted a photo of the incident showing the employee’s back with the words “Peace Out” scrawled across it. Yes, she was wearing fishnets.
The tweet has inspired the usual press lemming run:
Gawker led the pack yesterday asking the question, “Does the Fact That No One Is Talking About the Naked Waitress at Roberta’s Mean That Bushwick Is ‘Over’?” :
Bushwick is “the coolest place on the planet,” according to the Times, and yet no one seems to care about the naked woman waiting tables at its coolest restaurant — the sprawling, ramshackle pizza joint Roberta’s — on Friday night. I was there and I didn’t really care, though she wasn’t serving our table, and we were in a kind of post-traumatic stress situation after the two-hour wait and the Venusian heat of the wood stove-heated tent out back and the woman who called my friend a “whore” in the aforementioned tent bar for trying to sit down at a table on which she (the woman) claimed to have dibs. And anyway we only caught the waitress, surrounded by customers taking photos, while walking out, stuffed with pizza and duck and pork, and when we asked we were told that Friday was her last day, and the nudity did seem to be a kind of farewell gesture; she, or someone, had written “PEACE OUT” on her back.
Eater NY, Village Voice, Fox 5, Grubstreet all piled on.
As a former employee of the place, I can tell you the stunt was deemed awesome and the waitress is enough of a pro to not have ended up with food all over her crotch. Our only question is whether the Outdoor Topless Co-ed Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society is going to try to one-up her.
A Roberta’s source confirms that Friday was in fact the server’s last night, and that she has been working at the restaurant “since its inception.” Roberta’s opened in 2008, so after four long years of waiting tables, who among us wouldn’t want to rip off all our clothes and scrawl “PEACE OUT” in magic marker on our naked flesh? If anything, you’ve got to admire this young lady’s restraint.
Of course, the Never Nude buzzkills at Grub Street point out the NYC health code states that “employees who prepare or serve food products, or wash and sanitize equipment and utensils must wear clean outer garments.” Those fishnets look clean enough to us, so it’s unclear if the Health Department is going to take any action against Roberta’s. (And what about body sushi servers?) We called Roberta’s scantily-clad server several times today to find out more about her unusual choice of uniform, but so far the most famous naked waitress in Bushwick remains tight-lipped.
And BK Mag’s Virginia Smith is NOT amused:
Get it together, Roberta’s. Think of the first dates that could have been made excruciating by this! Not to mention the “hey mom and dad, here’s my neighborhood, I promise it is not a terrible joke of a place” dinners! Jesus. I shudder to think of it. But, then again, I don’t necessarily have all the answers. I guess it was her last day working, and that’s funny enough, and no one seems to have left in a huff or contracted food poisoning by virtue of a bare human ass in proximity to their expensive food. It all seems to have gone reasonably ok, other than the woman, who, per Max Read’s account of the evening over at Gawker, got all riled up about table space in the waiting area and called a member of his party a “whore,” which seems like sort of a blip.
And from around the Twitter thingy:
