Word Feast.(The Talk of the Town)(Union Square Cafe)

When Christopher Russell, a captain at Gramercy Tavern for many years, went to work at Union Square Cafe, where he is now the general manager, he decided to import a few traditions. (Both restaurants are owned by Danny Meyer.) He banished wordy descriptions from the wine list and switched from a two-fork setting to a single fork; he was successful in encouraging employees to escort customers to the rest room rather than just pointing in its direction. The Gramercy custom of reading poetry before the "family meals" that precede each service, however, met with resistance. (The practice got its start in the late nineties, when a manager was inspired by the performance of Dante's "Inferno" that the Cathedral of St. John the Divine puts on every Maundy Thursday.)

"The first two years, it fell flat, and I thought, Maybe this isn't going to work here," Russell said. But Russell is a man of enthusiasms, and, like Louis XIV with his court tennis, he eventually succeeded in spreading his mania for Shakespeare and Auden to the people. For the fifth season running, the wait-staff at U.S.C. began every day in April, which is National Poetry Month, by reading aloud limericks, haikus, villanelles, and quatrains of their choosing, and, sometimes, composition.

The other Wednesday, an hour before lunch service commenced, eight waiters, a host, and two bartenders, Times Dining sections in hand, were ensconced in green leather banquettes for a buffet-style family meal of snow peas, penne with green peas, grilled steak, French fries, and huevos in stewed tomato sauce.

"A couple of quick notes," Dina Millan, a dining-room manager, began. A regular, she said, had a table for one-forty-five--"three and the turkey," meaning she was coming in with two friends and her recently born baby. "O.K., who wants to go first?"

Tessa Antolini, a waitress and sometime actress, cleared her throat. Clutching a yellow paperback, she stood up.

"I called a man today," she read, in a near-whisper. Her selection was "Calling Him Back from Layoff," a free-verse workingman's lament by Bob Hicok, with a trace of terza rima. Her voice gained strength as she worked toward the poem's climax:

And if I give a job to one stomach other , forks are naked and if tonight a steak, sizzles in his kitchen do the seven, other people staring at their phones, hear?