The Restaurant Manifesto | Page 29 of 84 |

Holiday Dining Made Easy

Between now and the end of the year, restaurants will play a big role in your holiday festivities. Many of you will dine out frequently, sometimes traveling to cities far away or maybe returning to your hometowns. Your holiday dining may occur in restaurants you’ve never been before or falling back on those old familiar neighborhood places. Some may seek out trendy places that appear in every critic’s year-end “Best Of” lists.

The holiday season—though often the most lucrative for hospitality professionals—is the most difficult time of the year to work in restaurants. Guests arrive with unreasonable expectations, dysfunctional families are easily triggered and staff is always burning its candle at both ends. Bear in mind that the people serving you are sacrificing time away from their loved ones to facilitate your sharing a great meal with yours.

Here are some helpful hints to make sure you get the most out of your holiday dining experiences:

Ask what time the table is needed back – Christmas is the season of giving. Turn times are a harsh reality of the restaurant business that becomes even more harsh during the holidays. The simple act of showing consideration goes a long way. Most restaurants will pander and tell you to keep the table as long as you like—even if they can’t afford extending the courtesy to everyone—but acknowledging that the table may be rebooked is guaranteed to boost your status with the restaurant hosting you.

Elevate your tip percentage – We know, we know… you always leave a great tip for the waiter. But if your standard tip is twenty percent, go up to thirty! Most tipped employees don’t receive holiday bonuses. Because they aren’t salaried, any additional income during the holidays usually comes from guests’ generosity. Dig deeper into your pockets at Christmastime and show your appreciation. Being generous pays dividends, especially at the restaurants you patronize most frequently. Plus, tipping well just makes you feel good.

Offer the waiter a glass from your bottle of wine – Servers rarely get a chance to taste bottles of wine from the list because they are often too expensive for management to open for educational purposes. It’s always a great way to build solidarity with the staff to welcome them to sharing your wine. You might even order a second bottle, ask the waiter to fill everyone’s glasses, then tell him or her to finish the bottle at the end of their shift. Drink and be merry!!

Be respectful about unwrapping gifts at the table – We understand that friends and family often plan gatherings in restaurants as an occasion to exchange gifts. However, you should still be mindful how that can impede the staff’s ability to serve you properly. Don’t turn your table into an Oprah’s “Favorite Things” Giveaway episode. Order first before you open gifts so the server doesn’t have to fight for everyone’s attention. If possible, wait until your meal has been fully served before you unwrap gifts and always clean up any wrapping paper and holiday paraphernalia. Never leave your garbage behind!!

Don’t Wear Out Your Welcome – Especially if your holiday dining occurs on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, be respectful that the people working also need to get home to be with their families. If you notice you’re the last table in the restaurant and it’s getting late, pay the bill and thank the staff for being there to take care of you at such a late hour. They’ll appreciate the kind words, but they’ll appreciate even more when you get up and leave.

Leave a Positive Review for Your Server – The effect that review sites such as Yelp and Trip Advisor have on a restaurant’s success can be very influential. Unfortunately, guests with negative experiences often drown out the positive ones. Customers who leave thrilled rarely feel the need to leave feedback. Sharing your comments about a great service experience during the holidays can help balance the scales.

Stay Home on New Year’s Eve – Sorry, restaurant owners, but you’ve sucked for too long on NYE. It’s always nice to have a place to convene with friends and family to ring in the new year, but we can’t condone dropping wads of cash on overpriced cookie cutter menus and cheap Prosecco toasts at midnight. Restaurants never serve their best food on New Year’s Eve and food choices are usually very limited to simplify kitchen operations. Celebrate on January 2nd, and you’ll get the same experience or better at a third of the cost.

The Power of Forgiving Bad Service

The other night, I experienced the kind of catastrophic scenario waiting tables that haunts every server’s dreams. One of my tables ordered the most expensive steak on the menu, a prime dry-aged cut of quasi-Wagyu beef from a boutique farm somewhere in bumblefuck that massages the cows and feeds them beer or whatever. You wouldn’t believe the price if I told you, so I won’t bother mentioning it.

When the runner plowed through the kitchen double doors hoisting a tray with their food, the steak plate flopped over and everything, including all of their sides dishes, slipped off the tray and spilled onto the floor. It looked like a crime scene at a butcher shop in a gentrified neighborhood.

This caused a chain reaction. The chef went ballistic. The food runner responsible for the blooper cowered by the dish pit. I almost fainted. The manager’s face turned ghost white. Suddenly, we all went into triage mode like an EMS crew. The manager approached the table to break the unfortunate news. The chef immediately began grilling a new steak. The sommelier opened another bottle of the wine they had free of charge to begin the reclamation process.

Miraculously, the guests who ordered the steak didn’t feel victimized. They seemed surprisingly amused by the whole situation. In high-end restaurants, this is rarely the case. It’s not uncommon for people to walk out in the middle of their meals when food delays cross their patience threshold. But this party showed remarkable humility. They were even concerned that someone might have been hurt when the tray collapsed. I thanked them profusely for being so gracious and promised we’d make their dessert course extra soigné.

The wait for the replacement steak was excruciating. The truth is, most of the time when crisis situations like this happen in hospitality, the staff suffers through it more than the guests do. In restaurants, timing is everything. Minutes feel like hours, and servers bear the burden of long kitchen waits every night like a constant ticking time bomb.

The re-fired steak took forty-five minutes before it was delivered, but it came out perfectly cooked. The guests loved it, but it helped that they didn’t want to hate it. We sent almost the entire dessert menu with our compliments, including a special table-side presentation that drew everyone’s attention. Other tables might have presumed they were friends of the owners. We treated them like royalty because they’d acted like it.

How a restaurant staff performs in crisis situations says a lot about the culture of the restaurant. They should take guests’ bad service experiences even more seriously as good ones. Do they run and hide from conflict or do they address it head on and take responsibility for any wrongdoing? But how guests respond to these crises says a lot about them, too. For people who depend on external sources to make them happy, most likely issues with disappointing food or perceived bad service will exacerbate their misery. Those anchored by inner happiness aren’t as likely to be unmoored by choppy wa ters.

It’s critical to acknowledge that when things go wrong in restaurants that it’s rarely about negligence or even incompetence. More often, service issues result from unforeseen turbulence or the grinding gears that result from the difficulty in trying to make so many different people—with unique tastes and personalities—happy simultaneously.

Yes… you always have the right to be upset. But you also have the choice to show mercy. Try to imagine yourself in the shoes of your caretakers, and you might respond more charitably. Calling off the dogs when things go awry will make you more worthy of hospitality, the sincere kind. It’s never a pleasure to take care of people who bully their way into restitution. Having the attitude that the “customer is always right” might get you what you want, but it will never get you respect.