SERVICE? (YES) PLEASE.
A few weeks ago I attended a conference and as expected, I’d been particularly fed up one day after listening to a fair amount of people talk not about the topic but rather, about themselves. I’d left early to go get a coffee, thinking this would save my somewhat useless mood. En route, I walked past a restaurant I’d been meaning to visit and made a snap decision to have an early dinner (as early as 16:30 in fact) and this is how it changed my life.
After being greeted at the door, the opening line of “Do you have any dietary requirements or time constraints this evening?” caught me off guard. Sure, I’d been asked before whether I had any dietary requirements but not ever had anyone considered whether I had to be somewhere later or whether I’d like to sit and soak up the experience. I mean, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (it obviously does, just not to me) but very simply, that question translated not to whether I actually had any time constraints but rather, being told that my schedule is more important than that of an extremely popular, busy restaurant. And you know what?
It felt great.
Look, it’s not like we’re hitting up the degustations every week or dropping serious quid on Michelin star joints where good service is a given. I do believe however, that we’ve become a little complacent when it comes to restaurant service (for the purpose of this article McDonalds has been excluded). However, I’m not here to call people out, as that would be highly hypocritical. I would no doubt be an absolutely terrible waitress as you’d most likely find me having a wine with one of the tables, which might help in making them regulars but not my progression to employee of the month. I digress.
I’m not saying I want a waiter to look at me with the same smile an airhostess forces when they ask you whether you’d like the chicken cacciatore or the chilli con carne (internally screaming because they’re the same thing). I’m just saying, service should not be disregarded, no matter how good the food is, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that ‘these are paying customers’. It’s about communicating to someone that in this moment, they’re worth being served. As you’ll find, people hardly ever go to eat out for the sole purpose of having food.
People go out to eat for the same reason they go to the theatre, or a football game, or a gig. They need to be transported from a moment in their life to a moment outside of everything troubling them, and they need to not feel alone. For even if we partake in these activities by ourselves we should never feel the solitude weigh down on us. It is a shared experience with everyone in the room, whether they realise it or not. So if you’ve entered into this space of distraction – doing whatever it is you need to do to remove you from reality, it needs to feel like you belong there. And if on this given day your activity of choice was to dine out, the last thing you want is to feel like you are burdening someone with your presence.
A close friend of mine has worked in hospitality for years and when asked what her views were on service she simply said: read the room, read the table. Essentially what it comes down to, she stated, is that people come to a restaurant for the food and drink but what keeps them there is the service and how you make them feel.
Don’t ask your table how everything has been this evening; they don’t need to make a comment on your abilities, and more often than not those who want to comment on the service, will do so. If you read your crowd right, it won’t matter if you place the knife the wrong way (blade facing out rather than in) because you can captivate them with your ability to assess how often they need tending to, and furthermore, how much ‘education’ they’re interested in. Which brings me to my next point.
There is a scene in the 2010 rom-com ‘Going the Distance’ where Drew Barrymore and Justin Long visit a classic Italian joint on her last night in New York before they start their long distance relationship (I’m going to stop myself there before I give you the full run-down of how beautiful their love is). The waiter, when asked about the wine list, responded by saying they only have one wine (this being the one in the jug on the table) and Long’s character then jokingly replies with ‘Ah, now what year is this?’. The waiter then says that it is from this year. Long’s response of ‘nothing worse than an old wine’ is quite frankly, very lovely when considering the reality of the situation. Nowadays, you simply cannot get away with having a wine list and staff that aren’t well acquainted with it. People are going to ask for your recommendations and they are going to tell you what they want, however, this inquiry into your éducation gastronomique is their way of testing you. Human beings are, after all, inherently selfish and if there is any way of turning attention back to ourselves, we will - this is evident in our expectations that wait staff know everything and anything about the food and drink they are about to serve us, as we are worthy of only the best, especially if we’re paying for it. At the same time, on the service side of things, it also involves a fair amount of reading into just how much information patrons need. Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, do not over-educate your table if they didn’t ask. Put simply – some people care about the wine region, some don’t. Some care about wine pairings, some don’t. Just as some people like knowing that limestone-based vineyards keep the vines warm at night as limestone releases the heat from the day’s sunlight, others will not give a fuck about the quarry from whence it all came.
At the end of the day, people approach service the same way they approach any relationship. If you’re comfortable, enjoy yourself and feel you can be yourself – you’ll keep going back. Except you probably won’t tip a good friend but hey, there’s an idea.