Author: Peter Camarero

So many restaurant meals begin like this: You’ve barely even glanced at the cocktail menu before an anxious server approaches the table and asks if you have any questions.

“Could you give us a minute?”

“Sure, sure… take your time.”

Moments later, before you’ve even had a chance to open the menu, a suited staff member, presumably a sommelier or manager, asks if you’d like to order drinks or have any questions about the wine list. Fearing another intrusion, you obligingly order drinks.

After the waiter delivers the cocktails, he recites the specials and asks if you need any help or if you’re ready to order. You haven’t even had a sip of your drink and he’s already badgering you into making menu decisions.

“Sorry, we haven’t looked yet,” you say, summoning as much compassion as you can muster without showing you’re annoyed by his pestering.

“I’m so sorry,” the waiter apologizes nervously, “I’ll can give you some more time.” He stands uncomfortably close to the table glaring at you and pounces like a bobcat the moment you put down your menus.

This scene probably sounds hauntingly familiar to anyone who dines out a lot. As the industry struggles to combat shrinking margins by increasing cover counts, restaurant meals are getting shorter. Input costs—food, labor, rents—are skyrocketing and raising prices is always a last resort.

The only way for many restaurants to protect their profits in today’s challenging economy is to go faster. Allowing guests to dictate the pace of their meals is a luxury of yesteryear and most casual places can’t afford to relinquish the steering wheel anymore.

Even in the busiest restaurants, management has had to find creative ways to minimize turn times. Waitstaff are browbeaten nightly prior to their shifts about the urgent need to expedite table turns. In popular restaurants, the need to turn tables is often emphasized over the basic tenets of hospitality. Excellence is still expected, it’s just expected faster.

Maitre’ds, who are responsible for seating everyone punctually, have become merciless toward incomplete parties and tardy guests. If they seat latecomers or an incomplete party, there will be likely be rigid conditions attached for returning the table at a particular time.

Busy restaurants often aggressively over-book to account for no-shows and last minute cancellations. Many parties with prime time reservations will be given earlier slots even though the restaurant knows it’s unlikely they’ll be seated on time.

Getting more people through the door often requires making false promises. It also necessitates swiftly turning, if not flat out rushing, the first tranche of tables to seat the second and third wave of reservations on time. Talk to any restaurant manager about their priorities and, if they’re being honest, almost everyone will admit it’s turning tables.

As a result, hospitality norms have eroded out of necessity. Our primary focus used to be on making you happy, now we’re focused on making you happy in a shorter period of time. If you’re eating slowly, the kitchen may send your main courses before the appetizers have been cleared. Busboys are more likely to hover like vultures around your table, looking to clear your plates at the precise moment you take your last bite.

There’s a good chance the check will arrive without your asking. Didn’t that used to be rude? Once taboo, managers have also become less gun shy about asking lingering parties to vacate (though they will usually extend an olive branch, like buying everyone drinks at the bar).

If you choose to abuse the power to stay as long as you like, there may be consequences. Developing a reputation for habitually lingering (we call it “camping”) may negatively influence your ability to make reservations in the future. Most restaurants with computerized reservation systems have notes on your profile where they log your tendencies.

Of course the restaurant values your business, but it just doesn’t value yours as much as a guest who also respects the parameters of a normal table turn. People always like to think restaurants are democracies, but they are not. Restaurants are meritocracies. Because they are private businesses, favoritism may exist when it protects the bottom line.

All restaurants make an effort to treat every guest equally. But, as a guest, you have endless opportunities to distinguish yourself. The more loyalty you show to a restaurant, for example, the more leeway you’ll be given for dictating the pace of your meal. Extending that courtesy to everyone can be crippling to revenue and upsetting to other guests who are seated late because of it.

Rather than making demands about slowing down your restaurant meals or holding the table hostage, make an effort to work within the restaurant’s parameters. Showing awareness of the need to return the table is guaranteed to make the staff more gracious toward you. If you’re finished your meal but don’t want to leave, politely ask someone if they could find space for you at the bar for after dinner drinks.

Whether you like it or not, the best catalyst for enthusiastic service is always spending more money. Once you stop buying things in a restaurant, your entitlement to occupying the table expires. Management always does it’s best to extend courtesy to everyone dining to give them as much time as possible to enjoy their experience but, like everything, there are limits.

Restaurants serve as communal spaces, but the seat you’ve procured doesn’t belong to you. Staying seated in it for a long time is a privilege not a right, and, as the restaurant industry struggles to serve our communities, we ought to respect that more. Otherwise, our favorite restaurants may start disappearing sooner than we think.

At a former restaurant job, we used an antique ashtray and a vintage sterling silver jewelry case to present the check. The shape of each resembled the logo of the restaurant and guests were always charmed by them when they asked for the bill. The restaurant was quite tiny, appointed with a lot of carefully curated barware. The cutlery was adorned with mother of pearl handles. We were surrounded by a lot of precious things, which meant that many of those precious things would often mysteriously disappear. Management would blame the staff when silverware went missing but, most of the time, we all knew the stolen items were ending up in guests’ pockets and handbags. To many restaurants, theft is considered part of the cost of doing business. 

There were less than twenty seats in this restaurant, and I guarded the vintage items fastidiously. I knew I had to retrieve the check immediately or risk having them stolen. Kleptomaniacs are a clever sort, so we had to be vigilant. The garnish picks were the hardest to police. We ordered them in small batches from Etsy, by an artisan who made each one uniquely by hand. Each pick cost at three to five dollars wholesale. We would lose about ten to fifteen of them every few weeks. I saw a woman at my table use it as a hairpin before I went over to the table to ask her to return it. “Oh… but these are so cute. Can’t I just take one??” she said with an air of entitlement.

The night the antique ashtray disappeared, I noticed the woman at my table coveting it as she signed her bill. She kept telling her boyfriend how it reminded her of something in her grandmother’s summer house. I turned around for a split second to confirm a drink order with the bartender, and when I turned back she was gone and so was the ashtray. A month later the jewelry box was stolen too.

These weren’t extremely valuable items but, because they were vintage, they were difficult to replace. Restaurant guests who steal are usually small time crooks. Waiters guard their pens like family heirlooms because they’re accustomed guests pilfering them. Recently, a guest signed his check and took my sturdy Parker Jotter pen that the restaurant provides in limited quantities and left me his cheap plastic pen with a corporate logo. I try my best to surveil my tables but, even if someone swipes your pen, it’s difficult to confront them about it without seeming like you’re being petty. “I just paid hundreds of dollars for dinner and you chased me down for a measly pen?” they might wonder. It’s a flawed mentality though because in many ways they’re stealing part of the server’s uniform.

Why do so many guests feel so entitled to steal things from restaurants? None of these people wouldn’t dare be so cavalier about pocketing goods from a retail store of any kind. Purchasing twenty dollars worth of toiletries wouldn’t embolden someone to swipe a keychain at the the checkout counter on his way out of the drugstore. Few people would ever walk into their lawyer’s office and nab his stapler just because they were billed three thousand dollars last month. Yet many diners inexplicably feel entitled to repossess whatever amenities they please. I’ve had people jokingly ask, “I really like this glass, what would you do if I took it?” They ask this question flippantly because they know that a server would never have the gall to say “I’d probably call the police.” When guests frame the question like this, it shifts the guilt onto the servers as though their criminal impulses are normal and servers policing them would not be.

There’s something so much deeper going on when guests steal things from restaurants. On a subconscious level, it belies a greater issue within many restaurant guests that part of the hospitality experience is to excuse the occasional indiscretion. In other words, part of caring for their needs is an expectation that we will turn a blind eye to inappropriate behavior, even stealing. 

In an effort to manage inventory and deter theft, many restaurants force their staff count valuable items like leather-bound menus or flatware on a nightly basis. But those same restaurants balk at charging guests for the items they stole when they catch them red-handed. Too often, when theft occurs, the staff is blamed for its lack of vigilance. But waitstaff are too busy to be crimebusters.

As with most guest transgressions in hospitality, avoiding confrontation is paramount and standing up for what is right can be fraught. The risk of offending a guest (even the kleptos) isn’t worth the cost of replacing the stolen property. It’s unfortunate because a restaurant staff member confronting a guest who has just stolen something shouldn’t be considered inhospitable, it should be inarguably justified.