Three things all waiters do that make no sense to anyone but them
Dining out is one of the great American pastimes. It’s a social outing for loose acquaintances whose gaps in conversation get filled by bites of food instead of awkward silences, and no one in the dining party has to cook or clean up. But there are aspects of restaurant dining, admittedly small ones to be sure, which simply don’t make sense. Even the best restaurants with the most meticulous attention to detail and the top wait staff invariably end up doing the same odd things which might or might not make sense to them but make little sense to patrons. Among the many I’ve encountered, three examples came to mind today as I enjoyed a rather excellent meal at a local restaurant. These aren’t meant as complaints, but rare mere observations. If you have an gut feeling as to why they do these things in these ways, or you’ve worked in food service and you know the answers first hand, enlighten the rest of us in the comments section below. Or if you have your own examples of things about the restaurant dining experience that just don’t make sense, share them below as well…
The iced tea conundrum: You order a glass of iced tea. It comes with a slice of lemon, and your choice of sweeteners is on the table. You squeeze the lemon for all it’s worth. You drink the entire glass. The waiter brings a refill. It never has another lemon slice in it, but instead the used-up lemon is still wedged onto your glass. Is this because lemons aren’t cheap, and a free refill doesn’t mean another free lemon? This would seem to be shot down by the fact that even fancier expensive restaurants, where your $30 per person dining tab makes the cost of an extra lemon slice negligible, tend to do the same. Is it because the wait staff believes that you can still get more out of your original used lemon slice? Or is it possible that restaurants have simply never considered that someone who wants lemon with their first glass of idea tea will also want lemon with their second? I told you these were tangential issues. But they’re perplexingly confusion nonetheless. Which leads to the next conundrum…
Warm bread, rock hard butter: Nice restaurants often bring a small loaf of bread or some biscuits for patrons to nibble on while awaiting their entrees. The bread is often warm, but the butter is usually frozen solid. If you try to spread butter on the bread right away, you end up with a few large chunks of frozen butter on your bread instead. If you wait until the butter has begun to thaw a bit, the entree has arrived by that time. In terms of kitchen efficiency, it makes sense: the butter comes out of the freezer, and taking time to heat it up before serving would slow down the chef. But this tends to be the case even in those restaurants where even the smallest of details are thought through beforehand, and no other corners are cut. Or am I alone in wanting spreadably warm butter, and everyone else likes frozen butter on their warm bread? Yes, these are small issues. But the third one is of more substance, and more universally perplexing…
The wait for the check: Even the most overeager of waiters, the kind who check on you four or five times while you’re eating and top off your soda without asking while it’s still ninety percent full, automatically disappear once you’re finished eating. You may not notice it if you’re in a larger dining party where post-eating conversation fills the gap, but try dining alone and you’ll see that the post-eating disappearance is nearly automatic. They often won’t emerge for a good ten to fifteen minutes, by which time they know you want the check, but instead they come back and make the hard-sell for dessert. Waiters presumably operate under two mandates. One is that they want to treat you in a manner which will result in the biggest tip possible (can you blame them?) The other is that their manager has instructed them to try to get you to order a $7 dessert which is about 90% profit. So do waiters disappear after you’ve taken your last bite because they’re afraid that approaching you too early will make you feel rushed, and therefore in a bad mood when you go to leave the tip? Or is it because they believe that the longer they make you wait after you’re done eating, the more likely you’ll have digested your meal enough to be hungry for dessert? Whatever their reason for doing it, they must be seeing evidence that it works. But what exactly are they trying to accomplish? These are the kinds of things which leave me scratching my head nearly every time I dine out. If you’ve got answers to these conundrums, or perplexing questions of your own, share them below.
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What about when the waiter insists on not writing your order down, no matter how complicated it gets. Are you ever confident they’ll get it right? I’m not.