Amuse bouche...
Runaway reservations
‘It’ll be about half an hour.” The heavily tattooed blonde made a show of looking around the room, visibly weighing up how long it would take the table of six at the back to finish and call for the bill. “Give me your number and you can go and have a drink across the road — we’ll call you when the table’s ready.” She smiled, graciously, quite as if she was doing them a huge favour.
Sonia gritted her teeth and did her own weighing up: should they just cut and run now, go somewhere they could be assured of getting a table straight away — that is, somewhere they could ring and actually book — or take a chance that the tattooed blonde would remember/bother to ring them?
Sonia didn’t want a drink across the road. She wanted her dinner, now. All over again, she decided, never again! No more places where the “no reservations” policy was put forward as something cool and laidback, reflective of the restaurant’s joyful, spontaneous attitude to food, when, in reality, it was simply a way of sparing staff any actual work around managing a dining room.
A way of ensuring that all the pain and hard work was the customer’s, not the restaurant’s. Surely that’s what they were there for, Sonia thought irritably; don’t we pay them?
She decided this every time — that she would never again put herself at the mercy of staff who behaved like anointed keepers of the kingdom, when, in fact, they were simply, well, ‘tradespeople’ sprang to mind, although she would never say it out loud — and for a while she would stick to it. But then curiosity about some hot new place would get the better of her, or she would start to fume about the carry-on at the opposite end of the reservations spectrum — places where, you were smugly told, you had to ring weeks in advance. That was nearly as bad, she thought. By the time you actually got to the restaurant, such was the build-up — often they rang twice “to confirm your reservation”, as if it was an appointment to see the Dalai Lama, and not dinner — that it turned into ‘an event’. Which meant you stayed longer and spent more.
Why, she wondered as she wrote her number down for the tattooed blonde, could you not just get a table when you wanted one? It was supposed to be their night out. Had everyone forgotten that?