The constant state of stupid

From the chapter: Service service service

There is nothing like a recession—looking back at years such as 1991, 2002, 2008, and most recently, 2020—to force an industry to take a good, hard look at that quaint, old fashioned concept called service. Why? Because in times of recession, a refocus on service is not just the most effective way of remaining solvent by differentiating ourselves from competition, it is also the cheapest. It costs almost nothing, except for a resetting of goals and, more importantly, a change in attitude.

Ah, but that's the tricky part about service. Service, by definition, is tantamount to humility, or willingness to serve. And it has to be top-to-bottom: Starting with owners and managers, and consistent throughout the entire staff, every minute of every day all the way to close of night.

We expect, for instance, prep cooks and server assistants to be willing to serve by following orders. But how far is your owner willing to go to serve prep cooks and server assistants, at least by making sure they are equipped with everything necessary, from forks and knives to clean towels and medical insurance, just to do their jobs? To what extent is your executive chef willing to respond positively to guest requests, or answer servers' questions in half-civil fashion? Is your sommelier willing to talk to the chef, and prioritize wines that complement the cuisine over wines chosen mostly to impress other sommeliers or to garner free tickets to ballgames courtesy of distributors?

Sounds like a low bar, but believe me when I say: In my experience, there are probably more restaurants that fail rather than succeed in most of these areas⏤and that's just the tip of the iceberg lettuce.

It starts at the top because adjustment of attitude is probably the hardest part of the process of improving service. Yes, staff knows they aren’t supposed to stack plates at the table or knock against people’s chairs as they go charging through the dining room. We teach that stuff every day. Why, then, are even the simplest things so hard to execute, even in our most successful restaurants? Simple. If owners don't care, managers and chefs don't care, servers, sommeliers or dishwashers don't care, it will never happen. And it's easy even for guests to see, without knowing a thing about what goes on behind the scenes.

Case in point: While visiting Willamette Valley, I once decided to treat myself to a night out in Portland. Naturally I researched the hottest new restaurants, and duly made an Open Table reservation—albeit, a 5:00 PM seating at a chef’s counter (the only available seat and time slot available). Sitting down at my stool, I perused the wine list and found an absolutely delicious sounding red Burgundy for a relatively reasonable price of $80.

I was practically clapping with anticipation as the waiter presented the bottle, opened and poured it; but horror of horrors… the wine was corked. A few minutes after politely sending back the bottle, I began to feel the fear and trepidation I’m sure every guest must experience when a managerial looking person approaches, wine list in hand. She looked nice, the way Glenn Close did in the beginning of Fatal Attraction, as she informed me: “Sir, we’ll need to ask you to order a different wine because we tasted the bottle you sent back, and found nothing wrong with it.” This, of course, is like telling a guest, "You're an idiot with no taste."

This had happened to me before. Calculate 30-plus years in the business of buying and selling wine, divide that by the number of times I eat out (several times a week, in cities from Honolulu to Rome), factor in the multiple eras of high percentages of TCA plaguing the wine production industry, then multiply my looks (person of color, perpetual bad hair and large, crooked teeth) by the apparent inability of 99% of restaurant managers to tell a corked wine from the side of a barn. To me, at least, a restaurant manager refusing to acknowledge or take back a corked bottle is nothing new.

But not this time, I thought, because I really, really wanted that $80 Burgundy. And so, abandoning my more typical fear-of-confrontation demeanor, I pulled out my business card, explained who I am and what I do for a living, and proceeded to plead my case for a second bottle of said wine. “Oooh-kay,” she said, and hallelujah, she backed down.

Luckily, for all of us, the second bottle of the Burgundy was perfectly delicious (full of wild cherry and the proverbial dancing girls tossing fresh flowers). I poured a generous glass for the manager to enjoy with me. She went in the back to compare it with the first bottle, and returned to say, “You were right!” She did not, however, offer an actual apology, much less anything—a complimentary dessert, or measly glass of dessert wine—in exchange for the initial insult that momentarily made my blood boil, or for my sharing 4 or so ounces of my bottle to make a point.

Point being: Yes, we should teach our managers and staffs what a corked wine is; but that’s not the issue. The issue, again, is attitude. The attitude that the customer is not always right (since when did that happen?), or the attitude that guests should just shut and be happy with what they get.

As owners and managers, we should be teaching ourselves—since, as it’s often said, it’s the leaders who set the tone in every restaurant—the importance of adjusting our attitudes. When I go to restaurants and receive negligent, unprofessional or downright bad service, I blame owners and managers, not staffs. They only follow their leaders.

In that sense, it's not even about competency of staff. If you’re a restaurateur fielding complaints about your service, it’s just as important to look at your policies as it is to refocus on training or bolstering staff. What are the things in your own standards and procedures that may be preventing your staffs from providing the kind of caring, stress-free service that every guest deeply appreciates?

Many restaurants dig their own graves with seemingly innocuous rules that make execution of good service difficult. I once did a job with a chef/restaurateur who opened a place in Downtown Memphis. Within a month, the restaurant was slammed by the restaurant critic in the local daily newspaper, who gave it the lowest possible rating for service. The major offense? A guest happened to walk in and ask the bartender for change to feed the parking meter. Per policy, he told the guest to go somewhere else to find his change. Unfortunately, that guest was the anonymous restaurant critic.

Another true tale of my own: I once brought a party of 5 to a charming sidewalk French brasserie style restaurant just across the street from another chef/friend’s place in Denver. As soon as we sat down, I ordered $265 worth of wine, which included a bottle of French Champagne and two bottles of $65 cru Beaujolais (I adore crus Beaujolais). Our waiter brought smallish, tulip shaped wine glasses to the table for the Beaujolais—the type with lips as thick as my own—prompting me to politely request large Burgundy glasses instead. I had noticed the latter sitting on a nearby shelf.

I was told: “I’m sorry, sir, but our Burgundy glasses are reserved only for bottles with a minimum price of $75.” Of course, I responded with my own bit of logic: “We just finished a $135 bottle of Champagne, and now we’re drinking two bottles of Beaujolais adding up to more than $75… surely, there is some room for compromise here.” But there wasn’t, even after our waiter did us the favor of conferring with his manager on duty. What could we do—walk out in protest, just as our entrées were arriving? We drank our Beaujolais in those stupid little glasses.

One of my worse experiences? About five years before that Denver experience, in a tony South Beach, Florida restaurant decked out with oversized Buddhas and fake grass "growing" on the wall, a wine professional/friend and I were actually thrown out after ordering a $150 bottle of Champagne along with about the same sum in appetizers (appetizers are pricey in South Beach). Our crime? We didn’t order entrées, as required by restaurant policy (we were actually planning on ordering entrées, but we wanted to see how we felt after enjoying our appetizers).

It is not so much the stupidity to which many of our guests are subjected on a daily basis, but the culture that gives rise to that: It’s as if we are asking guests not what we can do for them, but rather what they can do for us. We are putting things like house policies, sales projections, cost control and even ego (prime example on menus: “No substitutions!”) over common sense solutions to everyday service issues, or what in our industry are commonly called “moments of truth” (that is, when we get the chance to do something special or memorable for our guests).

The finest restaurants undoubtedly pass those moments of truth with flying colors; the worst ones... well, is it any wonder that the average lifespan of restaurants is well less than ten years?

Needless to say, when we get lazy or full of ourselves, we invariably get what we deserve: Waiters who place following orders above taking orders, bartenders who can’t make common sense decisions, and managers who assume the worst in guests, judging them wrong long past the point where right or wrong even matters.

When times get tough, as it always seems to be in the restaurant business, a good idea may be to take a good, hard look even at the things we consider set in stone, or part of our identity. If times are tough, maybe it’s because we are making it tough on ourselves by establishing policies that, simply put, get in the way of that fundamental key to success: Good, common sense service.