Category: Restaurant Life

It’s just after nine o’ clock and you’re dining in one of the hottest restaurants in the city. You’ve been finished with your desserts for twenty minutes and the bar is packed with hungry people waiting for tables. “Should we go get a drink somewhere else?” one of your friends asks. You’re all having such a great time that you summon the waiter over to order another round of cocktails. Moments later, the well-manicured maitre’d regretfully informs you that the table is rebooked and your round of drinks will have to be served at the bar. You were not aware there was a time constraint on the table when you sat down, so it’s a bit disturbing to have the rug pulled out from under you like that. The maitre’d apologizes to you on your way out and promises to buy your first round drinks the next time you visit. But, by then, it’s too late. You probably won’t be back.

This scenario—increasingly common these days—exposes a reality of the restaurant business that a lot of patrons are in denial about: When you sit down in a restaurant, you do not own the table. Though it may feel as though we’ve graciously signed over the deed when you sprawl out on a spacious leather banquette, it isn’t really true. A restaurant reservation is a timeshare. Apologies to hospitality purists and Danny Meyer apostles, but restaurant customs are changing and so too must our understanding of the unspoken contract involved when you enter a restaurant. The notion that restaurant guests have a right to stay indefinitely just because they’re paying for it is an antiquated mode of thinking and impractical in the new restaurant economy.

The restaurant business can be distilled down into these simple terms: The owner rents space where he hires people to cook and serve food then tries to make a profit by subletting the space to people who pay to eat there. They’re not just buying food, they’re paying a premium to eat it somewhere nice that feels like—but isn’t—their home. For restaurateurs, input costs are at an all-time high. In order to sustain the health of their businesses, they must invent creative ways of getting more people through the door since raising prices will deter business.

A big part of the challenge of having a successful restaurant is learning to set prices relative to the pace of the guest’s experience. It’s simple economics. Serving a higher volume of food to a greater number of guests affords the owner the ability to lower prices. Owners of upscale restaurants that have slower, more deliberate service need to charge more. When you dine out at a high-end restaurant, the bill is not only to cover the cost of food, labor and rent but also the opportunity cost of giving you more time and space to enjoy your meal. Not all restaurants can afford to do that and sometimes—though they may be reluctant to admit it—they must sacrifice hospitality standards in order to accelerate the pace of service.

The reality is that most busy restaurants—despite still being earnest in their desire to please you—are obsessed with finding ways to usher you more quickly through your meal. They remind their staff on a daily, if not hourly, basis of the need to “push their tables.” It takes a deft slight of hand to conceal the need to serve guests as quickly as possible; the best restaurants perform this same magic act every night without their clientele noticing what’s under their sleeves. Some guests take it very personally when they feel rushed, but it isn’t personal—it’s the only way that certain restaurants can be profitable. Increasing the guest count is necessary to stimulate sales growth and can only be accomplished by implementing aggressive initiatives for turning tables.

Of course, resourceful customers find ways of subverting these forces to recalibrate the pace. Stalling with menus and sandbagging the order is the most common technique people use to hijack the timing of their experience. “We haven’t even looked,” they’ll say to barricade themselves. It might be an effective strategy in delaying the proceedings but it’s guaranteed to ruffle feathers. Is it worth taking an adversarial position with your servers to silently protest the possibility of being rushed? Many customers steal time at the end of the meal, too, by “camping” at the table long after the last plate of food has been cleared. Experienced diners evade asking for the check at the appropriate time or ignore the check presenter as it sits idly on the table, wearing out their welcome. These scenarios inevitably devolve into hostage situations. The server will continue to attempt to procure payment at the behest of management and the guest will refuse to kowtow to the bullying.

The wrestling match over table ownership becomes most hotly contested when latecomers join parties in the advanced stages of their meal. Of course the restaurant should accommodate anyone who joins late but they can’t without collateral damage to their reservation book. If you were renting a villa, the property would not just allow you to stay an extra night because you tell them you have friends joining you. Allowing you to stay would be a hospitable thing to do but at the expense of the person who has an outstanding reservation for your room the next day.

Restaurants have become increasingly more vigilant about keeping tabs on troublemakers. A proclivity for dining abnormally slow will be noted in your profile on the reservation systems and could result in your having more difficulty making reservations or denying you access to peak time slots. Restaurant relationships are all about trust. Reinforcing that trust by building a reliable reputation for respecting the table is worth it weight in gold or, in this case, its worth in real estate.

You innocently attempt to order just appetizers and the waiter interrupts to inform you—with perhaps a little more sass than is necessary—of the restaurant’s policy that you must order your entire meal at the same time. “The kitchen will not accept partial orders,” he says. You haven’t decided on the rest yet so you tell the waiter you just want to “fire up some apps” in the meantime. In fine dining establishments and high-volume restaurants, incomplete ordering is a divisive issue—probably one of the most common and unavoidable sources of tension between waiters and their guests. But why do so many restaurants need you to order everything all together? Is it really that big a deal?

First of all, let’s consider the misconceptions. Though it can be true in some cases, most waiters are not asking for the whole order so they can hustle you through your meal and turn the table. We do our best to to fire your food on a reasonable schedule—measuring time according to how quickly you eat. Ordering everything all at once helps to facilitate—though not necessarily guarantee—the seamlessness of the timing. Some diners withhold the complete order as a way of guarding against being rushed by a trigger-happy server or a passive-aggressive kitchen. While protesting the rules may result in your having more time, it also often ends up causing uncomfortable delays and undesirable hiccups in service. It all seems so easy until you actually understand how a professional kitchen operates.

In order for a restaurant to have a healthy heartbeat, things must be staggered in a way that keeps blood moving through the arteries and prevents clotting. This starts the moment you make your reservation. Instead of booking six tables all at 7pm—the time all six parties would prefer to dine—the restaurant will attempt to spread out the reservation times. (i.e. Book two tables at 6:45, two at 7 and two at 7:15) When you are seated, the maitre’d or host is also trying to spread guests throughout the dining room to avoid overloading each server’s section. Asking to be moved may create havoc for service when you migrate into a section that is too busy to accommodate you.

The rotation that goes on in the kitchen is even more delicate. There are only so many orders a kitchen can handle simultaneously. Every kitchen has a finite number of cooks physically capable of cooking only a finite number of dishes over a specific period of time. To make it work, the dining room is seated in intervals to give the kitchen ample time to stay organized. Sometimes when you feel pressure from a server to order more quickly it may be that the chef—concerned about a deluge of new orders—is pressing them to hound you. On their busiest nights, many kitchens are forced to fire food even when a table isn’t ready because they have to make room for the new orders that are piling up.

When parties are seated incompletely or when they insist on ordering piecemeal, it throws gasoline on the fire. If your party hasn’t fully arrived for a half an hour after your reservation time, you are now encroaching on the next tier of tables. The same thing happens on the golf course when people aren’t punctual about their tee times. It has a domino effect that will slow down everyone’s round. As a result, the kitchen will most likely be saddled with a heavier workload than they can handle.

Ordering your meal in fragments has an even more deleterious effect on a kitchen’s ability to perform. In order to understand this more clearly, we need to consider the division of labor in a kitchen. Most kitchen lines are divided into sections: cold appetizers (garde manger), sauteé, grill and pastry. Depending on the cuisine some restaurants may also have satellite stations that fulfill a peripheral part of the menu like raw bar, sushi or pizza. There will usually be someone who “expedites” the kitchen, the conductor—his job is to keep the cooks organized while tickets are spitting furiously out of the printer. Every station has a threshold of how many dishes it can produce at once. So, the expediter tries to create a manageable plan for them, screams it out loud and, if necessary, cracks the whip to make sure everyone is on task.

If the kitchen is left in the dark about what you are having for your next course, it inhibits the expediter’s ability to make a cogent plan. In the time you spend waiting to place the rest of your order, a handful of other tables have ordered their entire meal. The expediter has created a plan for his line cooks based on the information he has. New information cannot be added without threatening the balance of the rotation already in place—not without making the other tables who ordered before you wait longer than they should. Think of it like cutting the line to get on an amusement park ride. If you constantly allow people to order this way, the ones who have been patiently waiting will end up getting screwed.

It’s all about the flow. Responsible diners need to learn to be more trusting when restaurants set policies like not allowing incomplete orders or seating incomplete parties. We aren’t trying to make your life more difficult. It’s the opposite. We know our restaurant better than you. It isn’t always going to function the way you want. But it wont function at all if we can’t run it our way.