Taking Orders

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton looked right at home behind a restaurant counter on Thursday, chatting with several waitresses and writing up an order with a flourish. And now we know why.

“I’ve waited tables before,” she said.

Mrs. Clinton stopped at the restaurant, a Bob Evans in the southern Ohio town of Rio Grande, on a campaign swing in the Appalachians. Mobbed by diners and news personnel, she slipped behind the counter, where she talked with the waitresses about grits, stuffed pancakes and more.

“I might as well take a few orders,” she said, reaching for a pad and beginning to scrawl with a flourish.

This prompted one waitress to say Mrs. Clinton handled it like a pro.

Mrs. Clinton replied that she had been a waitress before, when she was much younger. An aide said later that Mrs. Clinton worked at a family restaurant in high school, when she lived in Park Ridge, Ill., and did a short stint at a Chinese restaurant when she was in law school at Yale. What is more, the aide said, she washed dishes in a restaurant-lodge in Alaska, on the midnight shift, in the summer of 1969.