Consider the pizza. A cold and lonely slice orphaned on a clunky white plate, surrounded by the detritus of gluttony – masticated olive pits, half-eaten crusts, a limp crescent of over-marinated capsicum. It’s destined for the bin, you would think, a sign of another satiated customer who crumpled their napkin and performed the internationally recognised hand gesture of an imaginary pen on paper that means “bring me the bill’’.

However. Consider you’re a waiter. You’ve just spent the past four hours serving food to thankless idiots after pulling a double shift the previous day with vodka-based refreshments to follow. You woke late, with only enough time to do the minimal gesture to social civility of the dry shower – a quick spritz of deodorant over yesterday’s clothes – before fronting up to work again. The gnaw in your stomach has gone from insistent to hostile. Blood-sugar levels have plummeted to dangerous lows yet to be fully understood by medical science.

You’re bottoming out. The law of diminishing returns means the odd cigarette break, snatched in the rear laneway on an upended milk crate, is no longer enough to quell the pangs of hunger. It’s still a full two-and-a-bit hours until staff meals will be ready, and anyway, the kitchen has been going through a phase where it lets the first-year apprentice experiment with his avant-garde food ideas as a sick joke on the waiters, regarded in this particular establishment (and in many others besides) as a sub-class of humans not unlike the Morlocks in HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Unbeknown to table six, lingering innocently over tira misu, there is a very real danger of this turning into a hostage situation.

And there’s that pizza, abandoned on a table, ready to be collected and thrown in the bin without a second’s thought where it will fester among a decaying food gravy of scraps and offcuts and eventually make its way to a stinking landfill. Would you eat it?

You spy your chance. The chefs are preoccupied by a spirited intellectual discussion (“Britney’s hot; Christina’s a dog, man’’), the floor manager has disappeared to places unknown, and there’s a blind spot near the dish pig where you’d be able to squeeze into a corner, between the bin and the ice machine, and stuff that bad boy down without too much trouble.

Let’s call it Il Crappo Italiano. One of those restaurants doing for the reputation of Italian food what the captain of the Costa Concordia did for cruise liners. Forget the nation’s proud regionalism, its produce obsession, its Denominazione di Origine Protetta swagger. Il Crappo is a swamp, a veritable red-sauce sea of shoddy ingredients with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and, for that extra frisson of Latin authenticity, candles jammed into Chianti bottles where they threaten to set fire to the raffia cage. You might have been there. If you haven’t, you’ve probably been to one of the thousands upon thousands of places exactly like it dotted across the world. You know them: there’s a spruiker out the front, bellowing about the “REAL, OAR-THEN-TIC ITALIAN FOOD’’ and screaming “CIAO BELLA!’’ in the face of every female under the age of 90 in the assumption that women need only be told they’re beautiful by a glib dude in a waistcoat to think “Goodness, I really feel like lasagne.”

You don’t need experience to work at Il Crappo. Who sold you that idea? Sure, they advertised the job like this: “Fun, Energetic, Vibrant, Proactive, Experienced Waiter/Waitress Wanted for Quality Italian restaurant.” (“Hey, that’s me!’’ thinks the morose, lazy, dull, reactive dolt in desperate need of some quick coin to pay this month’s rent. “How do I convince them I’m their man?’’) But here’s the thing you will quickly realise. Il Crappo is bullshitting just as much as you are. Working here is the hospitality equivalent of going down the salt mines. They churn through staff here like a logger going at a Tasmanian old-growth forest. Six months is considered a damned good innings. You’ll either be fired or – better still – muster the self-respect to walk out and never return.

Oysters were the big currency at this joint. They were the filthy lucre, sent back to the kitchen with such regularity they were obviously not the sparkling, ocean-fresh creatures of briny loveliness that are the mark of a truly great oyster. I know plenty of places where sending an oyster back to the kitchen would induce mass weeping and possibly ritual suicide from the chef who allowed them through quality control into the kitchen. Here it was a case of bottoms-up.

Nino, the general manager, loved them. “Mio caro, come to papa!’’ he’d croon over the suspect bivalves, instead of actually doing his job and trotting out to ask the customers why they didn’t eat them. Nino was one of those guys who come in 52 flavours. A moody bastard, in other words. This was a man who, when asked by a plump female customer what the three-cheese gnocchi was like, replied: “The gnocchi is amazing, madam. But you are not the one who should be eating it.’’

I couldn’t bring myself to eat the returned oysters, those rejected gobs of sea snot. But I ate the pizza, and the chips – chips being an authentic Italian staple invented by Garibaldi, if I remember my history correctly. No matter that those leftover chips could have been on the floor. They could have been sucked on by a toddler. They could have been coughed over, spat on, used as props in a reenactment of the Battle of the Somme, for all I know. But eat them I did. It was an early lesson in how quickly the standards of the group reset your personal compass.

There were moments to make me question the wisdom of the herd. An entire table of 16 staged a dramatic walk-out one night. Just after their meals arrived they stood up en masse and left, leaving a table heaving with oysters and veal, spaghetti bolognese and eggplant parmigiana. Was it a political statement about bad Italian food? Was it performance art? Their cult-like silence was bewildering until the last person pointed to the culprit: a fat, brown cockroach baked into capricciosa pizza. It could have passed for an olive if it hadn’t been for the legs sticking feebly out of the congealed mire.

I escaped a major bollocking that night when Antonio decided to go for the pizza chef instead, the hapless guy who’d let an unfortunate member of Blatella Germanica, the German cockroach, meet its maker in a wood-fired pizza oven. He was only my age, a skinny little thing, being verbally eviscerated by a 50-year-old man-mountain who stank of stale cigarettes. A hail of spit splattered his face as he cowered in his sauce-stained jacket. Behind him, in the blind spot between the bin and the ice machine, two waiters were shovelling down oysters as if their lives depended on it.

Prick with a Fork by Larissa Dubecki is published by Allen&Unwin and out now