Since the pandemic broke in March, 2020, we’ve tried to patronize small independent restaurants to help them to survive. As a small business owner, I appreciate what they were facing. And as someone fortunate enough to be able to order out, I’ve tried to spread the wealth, if you will. Some survived. Many didn’t. I could only try to help, as did many other people, including giving overly-generous tips. And people were generally appreciative of having people still ordering, buying, tipping.
But there is a problem I’ve watched develop long before anyone heard of Covid 19. While restaurant chefs have become celebrities, most minor but a few major, restaurants have lost the concept of service. This isn’t to say that servers are unpleasant or unaccommodating. Just that they have no clue what they’re doing or how fine dining should be done.
About a decade ago, a fine French restaurant on Long Island moved to a new location, and its old spot was taken over by a restaurant owned and staffed by young people serving nouvelle French cuisine with a silly childish name. But the food was supposed to be excellent, so we gave it a try.
It became apparent almost immediately that they saw things differently. The wait staff wore t-shirts while the table was covered by a white cloth. We ordered a bottle of red wine, which was served in white wine glasses. When I inquired about this, the waiter was stymied. “What’s the difference?” he responded. But the prices were “robust,” as the food served was not merely underwhelming, but not what was ordered.
Dr. SJ ordered a duck with a sauce, which arrived without sauce. Again I asked what happened to the sauce, and the waiter asked me, “Sauce? Like tomato sauce? You get that in an Italian restaurant. This is French.” I explained that the duck came with sauce, and he informed me it did not as this wasn’t an Italian restaurant, the second time he made that argument. After I insisted, he got a menu, read it, saw that duck came with sauce, and told me, without apology, that he would ask the chef. Ten minutes later, after the duck achieved prime room temperature, he returned to explain that they ran out of sauce, as if that was a satisfactory answer. We never returned to the restaurant. It is no longer in business.
This all came flooding back to me last week as we went out to dinner in Vermont at a fine dining restaurant nestled deep in the mountains. Our server was very pleasant and happy when he arrived to ask if we were ready to order our meals. I asked whether he could take our drink order, and he said, “Of course!” Upon taking it, he again asked for our meal order. I suggested he get our drinks first. He was accommodating, if confused.
A few minutes later, he arrived back at our table ready to take our meal order. Still no drinks. Dr. SJ poked me in the ribs, so we ordered. We then sat, drinkless, for about a half hour until the waiter returned to the table with our appetizers. Still no drinks. I reminded him about the drinks, and he was wonderfully pleasant about informing me that he would certainly look into it. A few minutes later, he returned, together with a few other wait staffers, with drinks and our dinner orders, as we had barely made dent in our appetizers. I ordered a glass of wine, a petit shiraz. It came in a white wine glass. I was about to say something but Dr. SJ gave me another poke. My ribs were getting sore.
But I did point out that we were still eating our appetizers as he brought out the New York strip two of us ordered, medium rare, at the full New York price. As the waiter carefully placed the plate to the side of my appetizer, he told me the kitchen was getting backed up so he wanted to get our steaks to us. This made sense to him. Dr. SJ gave me “the look.” I stopped talking.
After finishing our appetizers, it was time for steak. It was rare. Very rare. Not medium rare. Not even that middling rare which wasn’t medium rare but was edible. It still mooed. This time, Dr. Sj said it was too rare for her to eat, so we waved at our waiter for the next ten to fifteen minutes as he was busy moving from table to cellphone, and finally caught his attention. We asked him to refire the steaks to medium rare. He was very accommodating, even noting that perhaps its undercooked state explained why it was ready so prematurely.
Now here’s the really weird part. The food ranged from good to spectacular. The steak was one of the best I’ve eaten in a long time, and the brussel sprouts were fabulous. My daughter’s risotto and son’s braised short ribs were good, not great, but solid. It’s disappointing when a restaurant that aspired to be fine dining produces bad food, but the food this night was hardly disappointing.
And when we were done, we told our waiter that we would like to take our leftover steak with us. In a flash, he brought a plastic container to the table, placed it gently on the end of the table and said, “They ya go,” spinning away with a flourish
When we paid the check, Dr. SJ left the waiter a healthy tip. He was nice enough, accommodating enough, pleasant enough. He just had no clue how to serve food in a fine dining restaurant that was hardly shy about charging big city prices but saw no reason to train or manage its staff.
It occurred to us as we left, looking at the beautiful Vermont night, discussing our dinner, that perhaps the fault wasn’t in the restaurant or the server, but us. We had old folks expectations of service, the sort that we developed from dinner at Bouley once a month. Perhaps they thought that if food found its way to our table at all, they knocked it out of the park. And wasn’t this really just an excuse for the wait staff to earn a living and the restaurant to survive the pandemic? But the steak was delicious, and isn’t that enough?
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Bravo 🙂
Restaurants are even posting Covid-themed notices to patrons requesting tolerance for their staff’s shortcomings….with predictable results. Apparently the new normal is a race to the bottom between servers and diners, with plenty of serf v. lord revolutionary vibes and enough gaslighting to solve the energy crisis.
Ah yes Covid the excuse that keeps on giving..
I could have written this, not just because I, too, can kvetch with the best, but I feel your pain. The “service” economy has become the lack-of-service economy. Restaurants in particular are lucky to have a barely sufficient cadre of warm bodies; training is on-the-job, if at all. Red wine glasses, white wine glasses, get over it. Paper cups coming up. The solution, I think, is to find the old stand-byes and make sure they survive..
A delicious steak is not enough. You can get that at home, at a much lower price
You go out to a “fine dining” restaurant specifically for the food AND the ambiance AND the service. You aren’t there for silly smiles and facile excuses and undercooked food, served in a bad sequence.
I have the contrary view. There are aspects of service that are important, like “don’t leave people waiting half an hour for the check at the end of the meal”, but when I go to a restaurant I am paying for professionally cooked food. I don’t care which wine glass the wine is served in or whether the appetizer and main course are served together. Indeed, I feel very weird about commanding people who make much less money than I do to do a bunch of meaningless tasks that don’t relate to the taste of the food and which were developed as a form of signaling that rich patrons were of a higher class.
Of course I grew up in Los Angeles, which always had a higher percentage of restaurants with non- traditional service standards, so I am used to it.
Putting aside your initial points, reflecting that your grasp of fine dining is a taco truck, have you considered telling the waiter to sit in your seat and serving him, just to be intersectional?
You’re not “commanding” people. It’s their job. They get paid to do the job. And you get to pay them. They aren’t serving you dinner because they like you. They do it because you pay for it.
There could be a niche here for BDSM food service targeted at white liberal guilt. Occupy Chez Paul!
But sometimes the servers doing the job may like you and dare I say may have a glimmer of respect for you. If you are a likable person to begin with.
As I pay the exorbitant bill, pay the overly-generous tip, I, for one, care deeply whether my service liked me. I hold my breath, hoping that the server invites me to dinner or maybe a sleepover, because there is nothing more important to me, as a diner and patron, then I leave confident that the server respects me.
There’s a big difference between acting like an asshole toward waiters and expecting competent service commensurate with the nature of a restaurant.
I have been decreasing my standard tip. Rounding down more often than not. Rounding down even more aggressively than in past for mediocre service.
Just because it’s in someone’s job description doesn’t mean that we have to re-enact customs that were born in class privilege. The waiter’s job, as far as I am concerned, is to serve me the food, not to respond to my every beck and call.
SG wasn’t asking (or expecting) for “beck and call” service. Your argument is a false dilemma.
What’s concerning isn’t your feelings about the “class privilege” treatment of servers. You’ve already shown that you are the lowest common denominator, so things that concern your aren’t particularly important to others.
But what is truly disturbing is how easily young people rationalize incompetence. On what planet does doing a job competently equate with “every beck and call”? I worried that the future would hold only mediocrity, but now I’m concerned that even mediocrity would be expecting too much.
You are so committed to a weird fake egalitarianism¹ that you don’t even understand the practical issue. I’m a philistine so I wouldn’t know the difference between a white wine glass, a red wine glass, or a red solo cup, but the appetizers and main course being served together is not “meaningless.” One doesn’t want the main course to come out at the same time because then it’s sitting there on the table getting cold while one is still eating the appetizers.
¹You wouldn’t suggest that one of your clients telling you how he wanted his legal work performed was actually merely signaling that he was of a higher class than you, would you? If he’s paying $750 per hour, he has a right to expect a certain level of service that a $200 per hour lawyer wouldn’t provide, even if it doesn’t affect the legal outcome of his situation.
I don’t think that a lot of the symbolic things that people talk about in the context of “restaurant service” are “a certain level of service”.
To use your legal work example, if the customs of our profession required that we kneel and kiss our clients’ hands every time we met them, I might have to do it (after all, clients expect it) but I wouldn’t define that as part of “good service”. Good service is serving up the legal advice, or the food, as the case may be.
We got it. You have no clue why there are different glasses for different types of wine and can’t grasp why your entree sitting on the table getting cold while eating your appetizer matters.
But instead of your asinine “kneel and kiss” example, what about returning client phone calls? What about accurate billing? What about maintaining client confidentiality? What about keeping files? Just because you gave them legal advice does not satisfy your duties as a lawyer.
It’s one thing to make it clear that you are clueless as to dining, but if you’re a lawyer, then you shouldn’t be such a simpleton.
You’re paying for everything – food, service, ambience. If any are lacking (given what is advertised/promoted) and you are overpaying for what you get, that’s a problem. The problem many of us have is when a place charges high-end prices and fancy surroundings but offers mediocre service (or worse, mediocre food); you’re not getting the value of the implied/advertised experience.
By the way, the right wine glass makes a difference to the aroma and thus taste of a wine, which matters given wine markups especially!
One of the best steaks I ever had was in Nebraska at a non-fancy place with plastic tablecloths at group tables. No problem, they specialized in great steak not fancy surroundings. Another great steak was at a much more expensive NYC steakhouse, I had a very expensive half bottle of wine with an appropriate red wine glass. Which is also fine. Both establishments were true to how they advertised themselves.
Professional wait staff are hard to come by these days. I find it hard to eat out for that reason and the fact that the food is usually not up to the level I can prepare at home. When I do go out, I like to sit at the bar. It’s hard for the bartender to ignore you and the drinks arrive on time. There are a few professional waiters and bartenders that have survived the lockdowns, easy government checks and outrageous wages being offered by Amazon warehouses. And then there’s Bidenflation. It is expensive even for a breakfast.
BTW – Mrs. J does the same thing to me.
Well, when food banks are overwhelmed and evictions ballooning, at least you and family are not food insecure! This piece belongs in the New Yorker food section. You are nothing if not versatile.
By the way,, how was the downhill skiing? Should be good right about now. Were they masked or unmasked? Were you? Hand sanitizer available? Strange times result in strange behaviors, Dr. Fauci-breath .
You spent the weekend in Vermont with your wife and kids. Anything good happen?
Yea, the family downhill skidded all the way back to Long Island, which was not as long as it was when they left (sea-levelrise, dumb dumb) ….or as corrupt?!?
You sea, Scott is a flat-lander (water person), not a high-lander Green Mountain Boy. Put him on a pair of skiis, and he would channel John Revolta! Ha.
You high-flautin guys aren’t the only ones having server problems.
My local donut shop had to close the indoor seating area and go to drive-through only because of a lack of staff.
It’s not the same, sitting in my truck, sipping coffee out of paper cups, reading SJ with my tablet resting in the steering wheel.
I miss the heavy China cups, the tray of sugar packets, the dish of half and half tubs, listening to the chatter of other customers.
I’m not liking this “new normal.”
David Sax.
“In 2008, Milton Sheppard opened the Waiter Training School in the Bronx, N.Y., charging $175 for courses, but the business soon ran out of money. He now operates a clown college in the same space.”
In some restaurants, I’m not sure you could tell the difference between wait staff and clowns these days.
Probably most of the experienced servers have moved on to better opportunities in this economy. It seems like the newbies trying to step into the role have nobody to train them. Absent that, they are not going to understand either the menu or the conventions of table service at upscale restaurants. It isn’t as though they are regularly dining in similar establishments. Of course, when the cook can’t prepare items offered on the menu, that is really a management failure, and the world’s very best serving staff won’t be able to correct for that.
I have had some terrible meals out recently. Last night took the cake. “It’s the cooks first day on the job.” My Carbanora.arrived very dry. I tried, I really tried. I sent it back, it came back swimming in a watery sauce. I picked at it, and set it aside 1/3 eaten. To be fair, they comped my main and a shared dish.
But . . . I don’t think that it was the cooks first day on the job. I think it was the cooks first day cooking.
Too many restaurants pretend to be fine dining when they have no idea how to do it. Spotting new, true fine-dining opportunities is fraught with danger. Big hint: you probably won’t find one in Vermont. You will find good restaurants, with helpful, friendly staff, but you won’t find NYC style fine dining (or even Charleston, SC style.)
Why not? Why should Vermonters be less adept than people from any other state at serving a meal that lives up to basic expectations? It’s not like SHG has some arcane notion of what “fine dining” entails; he wanted a minimum of solicitude and wine served in the right glass. This is achievable even for people who don’t hail from New York or Charleston, with their highfalutin’ ways.
There are a lot of reasons for this, population density, income and wages, seasonality of much of the demand, but the main one is a lack of a stable of high quality, experienced workers and managers in fine dining. It sounds easy to execute, but it isn’t. You need a core group of experienced staff to perform the magic that is a fine dining meal. It is way more than the right wine glass. It is a choreographed execution in the midst of chaos. It is calm, knowledgeable and friendly customer facing while frenzy is occurring on a good night, or the wheels are falling off on a bad night elsewhere. It is extensive procedures and practice.
Half the restaurants in locations where the staff should be easy fail at this, even if they provide “good” dining. Vermont, especially rural Vermont (as an example) doesn’t have the food service infrastructure to support this, so it only occurs in the rare place where a combination of exceptionally gifted people come together.
Don’t get me wrong, we have lots of really great food places in Vermont. We just don’t have “fine” dining as it truly should be. I’m sure there’s one or two, but I haven’t found them yet. I see a lot of places trying, but they aren’t there, certainly not at NY and Chucktown standards (and there are a lot of pretenders in Chucktown as well, especially now).
You know, it’s been years since I’ve been presented a chilled fork with my salad. Service has been slipping for quite awhile.
I guess you weren’t eating outside during the winter where you always have a chilled fork and the ice never melts.
I mean you complain but that was service in Boston for decades
One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot more staff are willing to get into mild arguments with customers (which seems to have happened to our host re: the duck and sauce), and also are much less willing to apologize. So if you make a request, and you get your food and the kitchen ignored or messed up your request, rather than your server saying, “Oh, I am sorry let me go and have them fix it”, you get a curt, “I guess they forgot to do it,” followed by a blank stare, as if they’re trying to get you to accept your incorrect order by making you feel awkward about asking them to take it back.
Also, I know I said this the last time our host made a post about the service industry, but the places where this phenomenon tends to be the worst is the places where they’ve instituted mandatory, already-included 20% gratuity into your bill. “To support our staff.”
Regarding quality of service, when you go to the fancy place there is an expectation that the service is commensurate with both the price the client pays and the wages the staff are paid. My understanding is that unless the restaurant is owned by Salt Bae, wages scale with prices so better paid staff should be providing better service.. When we made a rare trip to one of the fancy places in town the admittedly T-shirt clad waiter did everything that SJ would expect and the owner stopped by to check on things. You can even get this scale of service in Walla Walla Washington
Admittedly, I don’t go to the fancy places and fine steakhouses very often, more to the mid-range places (think $$$ places on Yelp or Google rather than $$$$ places). Over the course of the pandemic, the service at these mid-range places from host/hostess and waitstaff has plummeted, and while this was excusable in summer and fall of 2020, it’s shown no signs of improvement since; you’d get better service at the The Olive Garden, T.G.I. Friday’s, or Red Lobster. I don’t know if this has to do with the wages they pay at the independently-owned mid-range places being awful compared to the fancier places, but there doesn’t seem to be any correlation to the price of the dishes and drinks on offer.
Maybe I’m just uncouth, but at the point the waiter starts arguing over a menu item he clearly knows nothing about, that’s when I stand up and leave.
I dont go to Applebees to get that kind of treatment, OK?
“But the steak was delicious, and isn’t that enough?”
In Austin there is an entire industry built around excellent food with no pretense of service, white tablecloths, or wine, in any kind of glass. No one ever, ever waits 30 minutes for the check.
They are called food trucks. They promise great food and nothing more, and the successful ones provide just that. Their prices are a fraction of fine dining meals.
Now and then a successful truck decides to invest in a brick and mortar storefront. It often doesn’t go well, as the price must go up, and hiring, training, and supervising a wait staff is a completely different set of skills than cooking great food.
Delicious food at a fine restaurant is not enough.
… unless the local government decides that food trucks are illegal… as is the case in Montreal.
Banned ‘for the public good’… unless at special events approved by the authorities…
The t-shirts etc. may have been a deliberate statement by management. The concept of fine-dining appears to have changed. See, e.g., Chef Floriano Pellegrino’s response to DeRuiter’s review of his restaurant Bros’.
[Sat on this yesterday but if comments are still open.]
The professional waiter/ waitress is a thing of the past. Once upon a time it was a real profession where one could make a living. Another example might be a clothing salesperson …
I believe this gave way to mostly young people viewing at a job on their way to whatever worlds they were out to conquer. But it certainly seems no Longer a profession. In Michigan where I am the summer resort Mackinac island was once worked by professional wait people that moved from resort to resort. Some said because they were minorities they were being exploited_ they were pros that made good money.
Apologies for long winded post…
When all else fails, accidentally dump the soup bowl in the diner’s lap. Tried and proven effective from N.Y. to San Fran and down to L.A. (Don’t do this in Chicago or Miami!) Better than revenge porn., trust it. Never employ this tactic with your spouse. Your marriage will be leftovers.
Here’s an idea: When the waiter asks for your order prematurely, start talking into your phone, even if no one is there. “Excuse me waiterpersona non grata, let me take this call? It’s my daughter! ” There’s no phone etiquette anymore anyhow. So go full Mad Magazine!
Or how about this: What’s the number in the kitchen? I’ll call it in when we’re ready. (And not a minute sooner.) You don’t really have to hover there (looking stewpid).
It’s Covid for sure.
My kid worked in fine dining all last summer and her tales are… quite something. I have decided simply not to eat out, other than at a few specific restaurants which seem to have managed to keep all of their competent staff. Bartenders are usually competent; in many cases it seems we get better service–yes, even for a $40 entree–if we eat at the bar. Even then there are some menu items (or dinner plans) it’s best to avoid.
So I feel your pain.
Oh, and Happy New Year! As always, thanks for running SJ; it’s great.