The Restaurant Manifesto | Page 39 of 84 |

Please Wait To Be Seated

No matter how much people love dining out, they never like waiting for their table. Seating guests promptly is consistently one the most stressful parts of working in a restaurant. Hosts and maitre’ds around the world are routinely subjected to childlike tantrums and fits of hyperbolic outrage when guests are made to wait. Unfortunately, what most people don’t understand is that the process of booking restaurant reservations is an imperfect science.

Filling a restaurant is like a game of Tetris. At the beginning, the pace is slow and the puzzle pieces fit together easily. As the night progresses, the shapes become more complicated and the pace of the game accelerates. Sometimes the pieces don’t fit as well as we thought and the puzzle gets messy.

To impose order, most restaurants create a flexible template for managing bookings that staggers the seating arrangement throughout the night. The template assigns a time frame to each different party size that is considered ample for guests to enjoy their experience. In fine dining, that may be up to two hours for parties of two (we call them “deuces”) or between two and three hours for larger parties. More casual restaurants may be less generous with projected turn times. They need more volume to make up for lower menu prices. No matter how the reservation system is designed, there is rarely room for error.

Predicting when each table will be ready is a tightrope act that can easily be thrown out of balance when unpredictable variables arise. If your party is incomplete or late for a reservation, this is why the maitre’d likely tells you he or she needs the table back at a particular time. You might find it inhospitable to be constrained in this way but so will the party after you forced to wait longer because you were late. The plan for filling the dining room rarely plays out the way it’s been scripted.

On any given night, the reservation book ebbs and flows—people cancel and last-minute reservations are added. There are no-shows or people arrive with a larger or smaller party size than they originally booked. The way the tables are plotted changes in real time based on the pacing of each individual party.

The truth is—no matter how much data you have, it’s impossible to predict the amount of time it will take each individual table to complete their meal, pay their check and leave. There are never guarantees that just because a table has paid their check on time that they will also relinquish their table. In other words, when we give you a reservation time, in many cases, we are approximating when you’ll be seated based on the tendencies of the average guest.

This is why everyone who makes a reservation in a restaurant should understand that a reservation isn’t a contract. It’s understandable to be upset if you’re seated past your allotted time, but you shouldn’t feel cheated.

Agreeing to a particular reservation time does not guarantee you’ll be seated at that time. A reservation is an attempt, in good faith, to accurately predict the time your table will be ready. It guarantees that you will have a table, but it does not guarantee that you’ll be seated at that table punctually. As a guest, you should always grant the restaurant a reasonable grace period. After thirty minutes, management should offer some kind of reclamation—like a round of drinks or complimentary dishes. They usually do. But even in these instances—though it perfectly fair to voice your displeasure—you should not feel entitled to anything.

Restaurants create reservation templates to help seat you on time

It’s curious that most people are willingly accept the same approximations with doctor’s appointments, trips to the hair salon, airline departures and cable service calls. They’ll compassionately forgive long delays in office waiting rooms or airport gates without anywhere near the same sense of entitlement. Would anyone dream of standing at the front desk in a doctor’s office and demanding to be seen immediately a half an hour after their appointment? So why do we get so much more upset when we’re seated late for our restaurant reservations? Many people look down on the vocational work of restaurant professionals compared to more white-collar service industries. We feel more entitled to bully a hostess for a table than an dentist for a root canal.

The reasons for the delay in each of the above scenarios are exactly the same: The amount of time it takes to care for certain individuals varies and is hard to predict. For whatever reason, when we dine out, we assume if we’re seated late that it must be incompetence. It often isn’t. In most cases, late seating is due to extenuating circumstances—traffic, bad weather, a visit from the Health Department, or just people “camping.” Asking a table who is lingering to leave is a last resort and restaurants only do so in isolated cases. As an impatient guest, it isn’t fair to support evicting someone who’s overstayed their welcome for you to be seated unless you are willing to accept the same treatment when you linger. Most people aren’t.

More often than not, the staff of the restaurant will be remorseful it’s behind schedule and will do what it can to make amends. Showing grace in these moments may be difficult but it demonstrates that you don’t put your needs above others. Your calm will be repaid in attentive service. Ask anyone who works in restaurants, selfless guests are the most treasured ones.

We Have a Restaurant Fetish

In an episode of “Ugly Delicious,” chef David Chang and comedian Ali Wong are having a conversation at Din Tai Fung Restaurant where they refer to the liquid that squirts out of a soup dumpling as “dumpling jizz.” Later in the show, we see it physically manifested when Chef Chang sensually bites into a Sheng Jian Bao and hot broth gushes like a geyser from the swollen dumpling. He groans euphorically while the juices roll down his chin. It’s hard not to feel a little uncomfortable witnessing this epicurean money shot, but we can’t turn it off or we’ll miss the noods.

Satisfying hunger has always inherently been a restaurant’s primary concern, but modern diners—raised on a steady diet of food porn—have more carnal appetites. The dining experience has morphed into an event that must be captured to maximize enjoyment. We objectify our food—and the chefs who make it—scrutinizing the dinner table with our smartphone cameras like forensic detectives preserving evidence at a crime scene. Eating is secondary to achieving the perfect Instagram-able moment.

No restaurateur has exploited these voyeuristic impulses better than the swarthy Turkish chef slash Steak Whisperer slash viral YouTube sensation Nusret Gökçe—more commonly known in social media circles as “Salt Bae.” Legions of lusty fans line up from New York to Miami to Istanbul for the privilege of having Chef Gökçe wield his phallic sword and carve their steak. Before they can enjoy it, however, they must wait for him to climax—shooting his proverbial load—in the form of snowy white salt crystals erotically cascading all over their sizzling meat. It might not seem totally out of place if he also cuddled and shared a cigarette with his adoring fans after the check comes.

The popularity of open kitchens in the early Oughts may have foreshadowed the dynamic of Chef as “Bae.” A chef’s work was no longer shrouded in secrecy. Television cooking shows had flung the kitchen doors open and invited diners in to see how the sausage is made. Guests were now privy to what was happening backstage and restaurant experiences had transformed into something meant to be observed. Long before social media, dining out had already become a voyeuristic experience. We learned that having someone cook for us, like sex, is even more fun when we get to watch.

The cumulative effect of objectifying restaurants is akin to the effect of consuming too much pornography—entertaining these impulses obscures one’s actual desire and makes satisfaction difficult to achieve without perversion. Increasingly, people don’t enjoy restaurants as much as they fetishize them. Whether they realize it or not, most of today’s diners measure enjoyment by arousal rather than nourishment. We talk about our restaurant experiences this way, too—“The food was good but nothing I ate was orgasmic.”

In the midst of this narcissistic spectacle, industry professionals have had to accept the unwanted role of being fluffers for our guests. Metaphorically speaking, we dedicate an exorbitant amount of energy keeping our guests hard and wet, instead of quenched and full. Tableside service has become increasingly overstimulating as servers mug for the camera. Prostituting ourselves in this way has resulted in a difficult predicament—we know that allowing guests to take video and flash photography in the dining room is distracting but choosing not to cater to voyeuristic patrons may be construed as inhospitable.

One night, I colorfully recited the dessert specials for a guest who interrupted me mid-sentence, reached into her purse, discharged her phone and asked me to repeat myself for the camera. When I declined, she reacted as though I was being rude. Because I was designated to serve her table meant I shouldn’t have say over whether she could broadcast my image on social media. She made me feel like a sex doll—a pulseless facilitator of her urges—and it ruined the moment for her when I wouldn’t just lay there.

This scenario also illustrates the way in which technology has eroded the personal connection that once comforted us about restaurants. It’s even more disconcerting to imagine a remote and distant future where embedded cameras in wearable devices will turn eye contact into video. Restaurants will deploy augmented reality applications as they search for ways of using tech to make guests’ experiences more immersive. Over time, these initiatives will only further exacerbate the problem of our objectifying restaurants, dissolving what’s left of the humanity in them where we once found sanctuary.

In this new world, traditional means of administering hospitality have become inert. For restaurant professionals, attentive service has always been defined by ascertaining the needs of our guests and doing everything necessary to fulfill them. But how do we forge a relationship with an audience that can only connect with us superficially? Hospitality professionals—perhaps with the exception of Salt Bae—want to be appreciated for the sacrifice that goes into pleasing others, for our minds not our bodies. Unfortunately, our guests are too horny to notice.