Scene from our Café des Artistes, a few years ago: a group of people was being led to a table on the mezzanine, when, all of a sudden, one of the women gets a tight grip on the handrail leading up the stairs and bellows, "You are NOT taking me to the back of the restaurant while all of the important people sit in the front!" Everybody who was in the restaurant at the time will remember that moment.
Whatever happened to the days when everybody knew his or her part in the restaurant dance? You went to a nice restaurant—there weren't that many to choose from—and you showed up on time, you were seated as soon as you got there, the captain greeted you and took your order, the waiter served you, the sommelier poured your wine, you drank coffee and brandy and tipped the maitre d'hotel on your way out. Everybody knew what to say and do. Café des Artistes, which my husband, George Lang, and I revived, ran together, and sadly closed last fall, was just such a place.
Then along came Union Square Café, which started the trend of what I call "not my father's restaurant" places. The food was great, the service attentive without being intimidating, and the customer could do no wrong. Customers were seduced by the lack of formality, and started to feel entitled. Chris Cannon, who owns Marea, the hotspot of the moment in New York, calls this the "Danny Meyer effect". It made diners presumptuous and aggressive. The waiters got cranky. Service started to suffer. What do we in the service business do now?
Just being nice goes a long way. It helps to be very, very charming. ("Nice them into submission," Clark Wolf, the restaurant consultant, says.) Everything else will backfire. Trying the "Do you know who I am?" tactic is obnoxious, and it doesn't work—it just makes the staff do an imitation of you over beers after the shift is over. And don't think restaurateurs aren't on to the tactic of reserving in the name of a celebrity (Brad Pitt, party of two) and then showing up as your own self. If you're nasty on the phone, a reservationist might make a notation next to your name in the computer: "thinks he's a big shot" or "real jerk" for all the staff to see at service time. (Another little-known fact: restaurant staff will Google a customer, if they're curious, or annoyed enough, or impressed.)
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