Author: Peter Camarero

The food media has been buzzing lately with articles about restaurants charging exorbitant fees to customers who bring their own desserts from outside sources. They may not show it but restaurants hate serving a dessert someone else sold you as much as they hate serving you a bottle of wine you bought elsewhere. Like corkage fees that are assessed when you BYO, some restaurants will only allow “cakeage” if you agree to pay to have it sliced and served for you. This is not a new phenomenon, restaurants have been doing this forever to offset lost revenues when someone occupies a table longer without buying dessert.

Both sides have valid arguments. To the restaurateur, a lot of effort and preparation goes into the design and execution of a pastry menu—selling food is fundamental to a restaurant making money—and allowing customers to bring their own food, of any sort, is a threat to the health of his business. In some states, like New York, it’s illegal to bring your own food into a restaurant. On the flip side, the customer feels entitled to special dispensation because of the circumstances—they have chosen this restaurant to celebrate a special occasion and allowing them to enjoy a cake of their choice is a way for the staff to make the experience even more special.

But it isn’t always a question of hospitality. What’s lost in this debate is one very important fact: Restaurants must have rules. It’s difficult to understand how critical rules are to the proper functioning of a restaurant unless you have actually worked in one before. Restaurants have a lot of moving parts which, in a perfect world, act in concert to provide a certain experience for the guest. When the rules are easily manipulated they may also be exploited in a way that can cause the gears to grind and the machine to malfunction.

Some diners protest when they are asked to obey strict governance, some flat-out revolt. An issue like seating incomplete parties, ordering food incrementally or making substitutions on the menu can become a flashpoint that quickly sours a positive experience. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to convince people that restaurants only perform to their potential when there are a firm set of rules in place. People often misinterpret this rigidity as a personal affront. In reality, the restaurant is enforcing these rules as a way of protecting their guests—to ensure that the quality of every guest’s experience won’t be compromised. It’s difficult to do this without setting boundaries.

Like all things in nature, there is a natural entropy that exists in restaurants. Ultimately everything eventually descends into disorder and decay—the air conditioning will always break down on the hottest day, the grease trap will overflow during the busiest time of night, or a giant waterbug will surface next to the table that has been least satisfied with their meal. On any given night, the restaurant staff—both front and back of house—spends most of its time swimming upstream, plugging holes in the boat to keep the ship from sinking. It’s easy to get washed away by the current.

Restaurant patrons often refuse to see the bigger picture. A chef might be able to accommodate a substitution on your entrée but allowing everyone to do so will be disruptive. The kitchen has systems in place that require concise repetition of tasks designed to maximize efficiency and minimize mistakes. These systems are fragile and even the slightest hiccup can set off a chain reaction of mishaps that will bring a kitchen and its adjoining dining room to its knees.

Because of the realities on the ground, the frameworks that restaurants devise often end up being less flexible than we’d like them to be. We are keenly aware that too many rules can cause friction with guests because they expect their needs to be put first. The customer may always be right… but one hundred customers can’t all always be right at the same time. Without rules and consistent enforcement, a restaurant quickly devolves into a classroom full of screaming kindergarteners in a school without a principal.

So, this debate over cakeage fees isn’t as simple as just allowing one person to bring their own cake. It’s a policy issue—one that all restaurants should be entitled to enforce according to their own judgement. Once you allow someone to bring their own dessert, you have to allow everyone to bring their own dessert. This opens the door for other more convoluted BYO scenarios. You might have someone with a gluten allergy who brings along a package of their favorite gluten-free pasta expecting the kitchen to prepare it for them in a sauce of their choosing. No.

Chefs put an enormous amount of thought and care into their menus and have a right to control what comes out of their kitchen. An award-winning pastry chef shouldn’t be expected to stop everything in his four-star kitchen to artfully slice the ice cream cake you brought from Carvel. There is a fine line between going the extra mile to enhance the guest experience and taking measures that sacrifice the integrity of your establishment. Unfortunately, whether it’s corkage, cakeage or something else the rules of the engagement will always be a source of controversy, something about which we—the restaurant and its guests—will always, sometimes unpleasantly, agree to disagree.

Restaurant workers all over the world will be stuck serving you during the holidays. This time of the year is the scourge of the service industry—an endless loop, stuck on repeat, where we forfeit the ability to celebrate with our loved ones so you and your loved ones can have somewhere to eat. Sadly for us, as long as restaurants are open, someone has to cook and serve the food. As if this isn’t all bad enough, we have to listen to the same shitty Christmas music playing every night. In the restaurant business, we dread the holiday season and often lament amongst ourselves about “just trying to get through it.” But, year after year, we take it for the team, flashing you our best “service smile” while we dole out generous servings of holiday cheer. January 2nd is when we celebrate—the end of it all.

The holidays are not only the most frenetic time of the year in the hospitality industry but also the time when people get the most fussy. Special occasions bring out the worst in people, especially among dysfunctional families whose issues often get stirred up at the dinner table. Without fail, people’s hidden demons rise to the surface during the holidays and the restaurant becomes the amphitheater for the tragedy to unfold. Waiters have front row tickets to the show and often—against their will—play an unwanted role in the drama. Your mother has always hated your husband but wont let you know until her fourth dirty Ketel 1 martini when she decides to tell everyone at the table (and the rest of Ruby Tuesdays) that you should have married your ex-boyfriend.

Effacing ourselves so that others can celebrate is a noble act—though you wouldn’t know it from how most guests behave. You rarely notice any change in the way customers treat staff during the holidays—with the increased pressure of making the experience extra special diners often demand more and are less forgiving of service mistakes. It often creates the perfect storm: Customers with bloated expectations being served by people whose sacrifices are under-appreciated. We don’t have any hard data, but we would guess that complaints by restaurant patrons go up during the holiday season when you’d expect them to be a little more lenient. Any delusions that people are more compassionate toward those who serve them during the holidays are misguided.

It’s also a misconception that working on holidays is guaranteed to be lucrative. Contrary to common belief, people don’t always spend as freely eating and drinking this time of year so check averages tend to drop. Some restaurants are ghost towns on some holiday nights like Christmas Eve—notoriously the worst night to work—when people prefer to spend time at home with their families. But someone has to take those shifts. The week between Christmas and New Years can be a crapshoot, too. People are often traveling or need to recover from the financial damage done by holiday shopping so they reign in extravagant dining experiences. For those of us who work for tips, not only are we deprived of celebrating the holidays with our loved ones but we may often be poorly compensated for the inconvenience.

If you want to show the waitstaff appreciation when you dine out during the holidays—do something nice. Share a glass of your wine with the waiter. If you have someone who regularly takes care of you, bring them a token of your appreciation. A gift card from somewhere, preferably a liquor store. We also accept cash. Bring a six-pack of good beer or a bottle of whiskey for the kitchen. (Industry folk do this all the time as a way of showing their appreciation of each other.) Bringing the kitchen booze is a total gangster move. Alcohol numbs the pain.

Tip more than you normally would. Your servers will notice and it will help make their holidays that much more tolerable. It might even help restore their faith in mankind—restaurant work can make even the most cheerful people misanthropic. We need to buy gifts for our loved ones too and a bigger tip during the holiday season might result in our being under less financial strain—which is the greatest gift of all. Whatever you choose to do, it need not involve material things—simply acknowledging the sacrifice is enough. Say thank you to everyone on your way out—all the way down to the busboy or the bathroom attendant. And this time say it like you mean it.