Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Restaurants True service vs. monologue service
Posted by Besha Rodell @BeshaRodell on Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 9:52 AM
I've made no effort to hide my annoyance with a certain brand of service that's become pervasive in recent years, the kind that keeps your waiter at the table for the first ten minutes of your stay, where you get their name and that ubiquitous question, "Have you dined with us before?" If you answer no, you get a lengthy explanation of what exactly a restaurant is and how you go about ordering from this crazy thing called a menu. Even if you answer yes, the server will often read much of the menu aloud to you, noting that almost everything is "exceptional." The server will also tell you his favorite menu items, the restaurant's specialties, and maybe, a few off-menu specials.
There's a lot to loathe about this kind of service, and it's becoming more prevalent. First, it's condescending. It assumes that the customer is not familiar with the concept of restaurant dining, or the concept of a menu. If taken literally, it sometimes appears that the waiter thinks you can't actually read. It interrupts the flow of dinner - a couple of minutes for specials and order-taking is one thing, ten minutes of uncomfortable listening is another. It is a monologue, not a conversation. There are plenty of instances when discussion of the menu is needed, when further detail is required. In those cases, a conversation with the waiter should take place. But the droning script many restaurants force their servers to recite doesn't feel conversational. It feels even less so when you have to hear it all over again at the next table when new customers arrive.
All of the above can be written off as small scale annoyance, but recently I've begun to recognize the insidious reality behind this monologue-as-service style of waiting tables, and that is that asking if we've been there before and reading the menu aloud is a veil, a distraction. Restaurant managers mistakenly think that if they can force everyone to deliver a well-rehearsed script they don't have to actually train servers on the important stuff. Like, knowing how the food tastes. Or knowing the wine list. Or understanding how a dish is actually put together.
This began to dawn on me a few weeks back when I was visiting a restaurant for a review. During my three visits I had three different waiters who each delivered the exact same speil, a long speil, with all the usual info - name, have-you-dined-with-us-before, let-me-tell-you-a-little-about-our-menu, blah blah blah - 10 minutes later - blah. After the regular menu was read aloud, waiters recited specials from pieces of paper kept in their pockets. One night, the specials came with almost pornographic detail; "Succulent pieces of lobster swimming in a luxuriant cream sauce over delicate house-made noodles," etc. After the waiter was done with his presentation, he disappeared, for a long time. When he came back, we had a few questions. For each one, he seemed totally flummoxed, and had to run and ask someone the preparation of a certain dish, or what kind of booze was in a cocktail. When someone at the table asked him for a recommendation, he looked desperate, then pulled out his piece of paper and read the lobster special description in all its glory all over again. It was obvious this man had never eaten the food, and knew nothing about it. But he sure knew his script! A few nights later, our waitress was so confused about the wine we ordered, she repeatedly brought the wrong bottle - the same wrong bottle - trying to insist that it was what we ordered. It wasn't even the right grape/region/etc. But no one had ever actually explained the wine to her, or let her taste anything so she'd be familiar. Instead, they had forced her to learn a few lines about the nature of their wine list and how to helpfully point out where on the list to look for by-the-glass selections.
After this, I began taking notice. And almost across the board, I've found it to be true: Restaurants where servers talk your ear off are the ones where it's almost impossible to get something like a knowledgable recommendation or a sensible conversation about the food.
True training, resulting in true service, is hard. You have to teach servers all that old-school stuff, about when to clear a plate and how to properly present wine. You have to make sure you've hired people with enough emotional intelligence to understand when a table wants a huge presentation about what they're about to eat and when they just want to be left alone. Good service includes deep understanding of the food being served, real understanding, the type of understanding that comes from eating the food and discussing the food with the chef.
But making someone learn a lame speech is quicker.
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