National Post (National Edition)
Customers are always wrong at the modern restaurant.
RESTAURANTS’ REJECTION OF PATRON CONVENIENCE BECOMES A POINT OF PRIDE
It used to be, not so long ago, that one could reasonably expect a restaurant to accommodate the wishes of its clientele — no matter how eccentric or troublesome those wishes may be. The diner who demanded a Waldorf salad sans walnuts and mayonnaise would have one begrudgingly prepared for him. The patron who preferred to sit alone at a table for eight would on a slow night be indulged. The regular with a taste for a dish not on the menu would be satisfied at her whim. It was a tacit policy of the business: to even the fussiest and most demanding customer the savvy restaurant owner would always defer.
Of course, deference remains essential to customer service. And the restaurant business has remained to great extent a customer service industry. But over the past several years one may have observed — in the fashionable cosmopolitan dining rooms of Toronto and Vancouver in particular — a tendency away from saying yes and toward saying no. The Waldorf salad may be enjoyed only as described on the bill of fare, no substitutions. Eight-top tables are reserved for parties of eight exclusively. The kitchen refuses outright to whip up something off-menu. Call it a revision of policy. To the chef and the chef alone does the modern restaurant now defer.
Phone up a popular restaurant this afternoon with a mind to book a table and you may be surprised to hear that you cannot. It isn’t that the crowds have already thronged the room to capacity. Nor is the wait list unmanageably long. It’s that many restaurants in the city today simply refuse reservations. They seat prospective diners on a firstcome, first-serve basis, even — it sometimes seems especially — if the wait for tables therefore sprawls out to two or three hours per party every night. The hungry would-be patron is obliged to arrive at ten o’clock on a Monday if they have any hope at all of securing a place punctually. Still it may not be enough. The modern diner will frequently find themselves nursing cocktails at a bar nearby the eatery they’ve been told they must try, glancing defeatedly at their phone every few minutes in case the maitre’d has finally called.
Well, defensive restaurateurs will be quick to tell you, tables are often cancelled at the last minute, leaving the front-ofhouse staff in a bind; other reservations wind up unfulfilled without any notice or warning at all. But is it really fair to make the customer suffer to alleviate the burden of the restaurateur? Besides which, foregoing reservations has another fairly transparent benefit to the business owner: long lines and two-hour wait times certainly make the restaurant seem in-demand.
In the 1980s a months-long reservation list signified exclusivity. Now that kind of upmarket glamour can be cultivated straight away. Ditch the list and embrace the line. Every sucker who sticks around to wait is a testament to the room’s irresistible cool.
Supposing you are able to endure the wait and make it through an unaccommodating meal, what’s in store for you at the end of the evening is often no less vexing. A new trend among certain restaurants — perfectly modern restaurants in all other respects — is the rejection, inexplicable to me, of credit cards. I don’t mean the relatively common inability to accept American Express. I mean the inability to accept any major credit card at all — a fact typically revealed only once the bill has already been presented and the Mastercard or Visa is already on the table.
Why on earth should a restaurant accept only cash (or, as one sometimes sees, only cash or Canadian debit) in 2017? How much could the restaurant possibly be saving in processing fees? Pay on our terms, such a policy declares. We are the ones with the power and you, the benighted diner, are at our mercurial mercy.
Worse still is another recent custom I’ve noticed around bills. Suppose you’ve just enjoyed cocktails and a delectable meal with three close friends. The cheque arrives: one slip of paper, instead of the four you were hoping for. “Oh,” you patiently object to the server. “Could we get separate bills?” A simple enough request, one might assume. But no. Today you are as likely as not to receive in response a firm shake of the head. “We can’t do separate bills,” the server will tell you. You will thus be obliged, through martiniclouded eyes, to divide food and drink among the appropriate parties. You have been plucked from the comfort of the dinner party and dropped into math class.
Increasingly, it seems, restaurants are refusing to split bills on principle. One hears that the server is unable — that the machine used for processing cheques can’t do it (a lie: all of them can), that it’s standard policy not to for one reason or another (always arcane and unconvincing). Restaurateurs will tell you that not splitting bills is a matter of speed: it takes too long, and they’d prefer to get people in and out more quickly. Of course a group forced to decide amongst themselves who ordered what and how much each owes for it takes vastly longer than a machine’s speedy and infallible divisions — and in fact often proves so miserable and enervating that it can ruin all at once an otherwise delightful evening.
But again the onus has shifted from owner to clientele. We have to do the work that the restaurant has decided for them is too hard.