The man looked vaguely familiar, but not familiar enough for me to remember much about him. I didn’t know his name, his drink or even, for sure, where I knew him from. Thirty-five years in the bar business covers a lot of ground. Mexican cantinas, discos, live music venues, high-end restaurants, dive bars, tourist stopovers, I have done it all, and I have seen a lot of people along the way.

He was by himself, which didn’t strike me as odd. It was Christmas Eve, and so that should have — at least a little bit. But something told me it wasn’t odd, and that also struck me as odd. And in my business, two odds are more than enough to warrant a second look.

But a second look wasn’t forthcoming — at least not immediately.

“Jeff, wonderful to see you!” said someone I did know.

“I didn’t expect you tonight,” he added, grasping me in a big man hug.

I don’t work every Christmas Eve, it’s always the luck of the draw. If it falls on a normally scheduled shift, then I typically do. But most restaurants with longstanding staff try and split up the holidays, because Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve always fall on the same weekday every year. And that just isn’t fair.

Holidays mean holiday menus. No business is going to settle for selling someone “just” a side of French fries on a night that has been sold out for weeks. It just isn’t going to happen.

“I’ll have a side of French fries,” said a woman in an ugly holiday sweater and Santa cap ensemble, sitting at the bar pulling me away from the family that I knew.

It was only the second thing that she and her identically attired male companion had ordered in the hour that they had sat at the bar. The other thing, a split glass of “house white,” was still sitting there, next to two hot waters and bread.

I was going to have to have “that” conversation with her: the one that never ends well. Because sometimes in the restaurant business, you can’t say the true part out loud. In fact, you have to even be careful when hinting at it.

Meanwhile, the man I barely recognized was working his way through the prix fixe menu. Seven courses are a lot. Sometimes that means in addition to seven plates of food, there’s also going to be seven forks, several knives, maybe a spoon or two, and at least a couple of napkins. It’s a lot of service.And oddly enough, it was after the first course that I remembered where I knew him from. When he finished his amuse-bouche, he placed the empty plate right into the middle of my work area. He neither merely pushed it forward, indicating that he was finished as so many people do, nor did he cross his cutlery like they teach you in finishing school. Instead, he picked up his plate and placed it right on the rubber mat used to make drinks. And he did it while I was, in fact, making drinks on it, which forced me to juggle the shaker, glass, ice and the various other apparatuses I use in order to stop, pick up and move his plate.

Three courses later, and three placed plates later, I remembered another Christmas Eve and another series of placed plates.

“You’ve been in before,” I said between courses four and five.

“I’ve been coming here for years,” he said. “For the last few Christmas Eves, I have sat at the bar.”

Well, that solved one mystery, because I have worked a few of those Eves.

“I thought I recognized you,” I said.

An intermezzo, two more placed plates and another juggling act on my part, and we arrived at the end of his meal.

It was only while he lingered long over dessert and coffee — which weren’t included in the meal — that I finally guessed the truth. On second look, I realized that he had said that for only “the last few Christmas Eves” had he sat at the bar. I realized that he must have sat in the dining room for all the others. And he had sat in there with someone else: someone who, for whatever reason, was no longer around.

Leaving me these thoughts:

• The truth is often revealed simply upon a second look.

• Sometimes people aren’t being annoying just to be annoying, sometimes they are just trying to be helpful.

• Cherish the moments that you have with your loved ones because they don’t last forever.

• Author Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” is one of the saddest holiday stories that I have ever read. And even as a small child, I knew I never wanted to be like the people who walked by her as she froze.

• This Christmas Eve, I bought that man his dessert and coffee. No matter who you are, or what you do, sometimes you deserve a little compassion, too.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com