Jonathan White was a server at Perry Street before he started work at the Tasting Room last year, when the Haute Barnyard fixture moved to its larger location.

“The main reason,” White says of his job change, “was to get into that relaxed environment where you have more autonomy and you can interact with the guests” — to the point, apparently, where they feel comfortable telling him he looks like Fidel Castro (he’s also gotten Lenin, Chekhov, and Shakespeare). We asked White (who is actually a writer) to give us just a little taste of his day job.

Long before you’ve taken your first bite of Ninja’s Japanese-French-American fusion fare, you’ll have fully experienced the highpoints of this Tribeca Disneyland.

Guests are whisked into the subterranean space by elevator, led to the dining area via a secret path (peopled by live “ninjas” poised to scare the living daylights out of you), then brought to the recesses of a feudal castle where each dungeonlike chamber houses a single table. Nina Cha found her calling when she answered a Craigslist ad that read, "WANTED: Ninjas who do magic."

Carly Skinner was a server at Houston’s before she came to Upper East Side foodie fixture davidburke & donatella.

The change was not a small one. “I had to learn a new food vocabulary,” she says. “I was working with servers who had been at places like Le Cirque for twenty years.

” Nine months later, she’s now a captain at the restaurant and training to be a sommelier. We asked her to enlighten us about fussy diners, angry lobsters, and smelly smokers.

When Michael Harr applied for a job at the Box, his only previous waiting experience was at a summer camp — he figures he was hired mostly for his look, cultivated in part because he’s a musician in the Scallywag Sideshow. “They had a woman doing costumes,” he remembers.

“While [the other employees] were on line getting measured, she came up to me and said, ‘You can just wear whatever is in your wardrobe.’” We asked Michael about the inner workings of the city’s most popular yet enigmatic dinner cabaret — not surprisingly, he kept his answers very close to his vintage vest.

David Moltz just celebrated his first anniversary as a server at raw-food mecca Pure Food and Wine. He isn’t going anywhere — at least not until his band Salt and Samovar takes off — and why would he? He’s had the opportunity to serve everyone from raw foodists such as Woody Harrelson to fellow omnivores such as Bill Clinton.

We asked him to spill the beans (not cooked, of course) on fussy vegheads, surprisingly friendly models, and the “hump couch” in one of the city’s most coveted gardens (now open for spring).

Nathan Frye, sat out Balthazar’s tenth-anniversary last night, but it was a grand ole time — much Champagne was spilled and a total stranger tried to crawl onto our table.

Of course, Balthazar wasn’t the first of Keith McNally’s restaurants to turn ten — last year Pravda had an equally boisterous birthday celebration.

To be fair we thought we’d get the straight propaganda from Rania Haditirto, bass player for the rock band the Kelly Affair, who has been a server at the vodka den for half of its life span.

New Orleans native Nicoye Banks has been a captain at A Voce ever since its buzzy opening last year (he was at the Tribeca Grand before that).

In addition, he’s acted in movies such as Invincible and the upcoming Colin Farrell and Ed Norton drama Pride and Glory. Though he’s not one to “do the Hollywood thing” on the job, he’s had opportunity not only to serve but also to sit down with heroes like Denzel Washington and Laurence Fishburne, and his acting background has proven more than handy in selling duck meatballs to just about everyone who walks in.

After graduating from Juilliard, Katarina Auster started a pop-rock band called Majorette that was signed to Sony.

Instead of blowing her advance, she took a job as a server at Morimoto. Her boss there, music booker turned restaurateur Stephen Starr, tells her to thank him when she gets a Grammy; before that happens and she finally leaves, we thought we’d ask her what it’s like playing “shadow” in the vicinity of misbehaving celebrities, awful blind dates, mysterious fish thefts, and the Iron Chef’s fugu theatrics.

For the past year School of Visual Arts student Melissa Barnes has been a server at Lotus. The fashion and design major hasn’t met Jessica Stam there — she says the former hot spot has become “a tourist attraction, basically”—but the club has done something for her budding fashion career.

“During Fashion Week Lotus has a bar in the tents,” she says, “So the bartenders that work there make friends with the security people. This year the security guys let us go into some of the shows.” So how does one sneak past the velvet rope at her place of employment? “It’s not hard to get in at all,” Melissa confesses.