November 1987: Dumb Waiters

                                                                                                                 Creatista

Everywhere I go these days, service is rotten. Well, maybe not everywhere, but you get my drift.

Know where service is best? At 30,000 feet. Know where it’s second best? At home, most of the time. Know why home delivery is catching on, why Domino’s is smiling all the way to the bank, why more and more people than ever before are ordering food to go? Not because of the VCR or the sense of family, but because most of us have had it with lousy service: indifferent waiters, arrogant maitre d’s, sassy, gum-snapping teenagers, rude managers, grapes of wrath wine stewards, ungracious cashiers (they shove your credit card receipt at you while offering you an after-dinner mint), ill-mannered captains, and every once in a while, a chef who, when and if he (or she) decides to follow up on a complaint about the way a dish was prepared will tell you, in no uncertain terms, “Sorry you don’t like it, but that’s the way we prepare it here.”

Service: take it or leave it. Is that it?

Say “hello” to Southern hospitality: at a banquet at the Hyatt Regency in Savannah, GA, after what I feel is a tolerable delay, I complain I am the only one at my table who has yet to be served the first course. An oversight, of course (and one I am content to accept), but one which I feel ought to be brought to the attention of someone. Someone acknowledges my complaint matter-of-factly, but continues doing what she was doing—moving from table to table pouring coffee. I complain to another waiter. “I am well aware of that,” he says. There are, I am forced to conclude, buried somewhere in the hotel’s employee manual, different guest-service rules for different venues: one, for banquets, another for the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant. Do I need to explain?

In my room several hooks of my shower curtain are unhooked. I spend time hooking. If I don’t, the curtain will hang improperly and when I shower, water will flood the bathroom. Why am I doing this? I ask myself. My room with tax: $93.

The next day at 6:30 a.m., there is a knock at my door. It is roomservice delivering food I did not order. I tell the waiter that. “OK,” he says. OK?

When I check out, there is on my folio a charge for roomservice I did not order.

My room looks out on the atrium of the hotel. Even with the windows shut, I hear the sounds from the lobby, a pleasant enough diversion during the day, not so at night: the sounds are annoying. Off the atrium’s lobby is the hotel’s lounge. From the lounge spills the incessant bass beat of a rock group or what passes for a rock group. The bass beat (not the treble or mid-range, only the bass) goes on well past midnight. Am I the only guest trying to sleep?

On the other side of the hotel, a different treat. The hotel is next door to city hall. In the hall’s tower is a big clock with chimes that chime loudly every hour on the hour night and day. Why, when the hotel was built, didn’t the owners soundproof the rooms? Why, after the hotel was built, didn’t the hotel ask city hall to mute the chimes after, say, 10 p.m.? Other than Cinderella, who needs to know when it’s midnight?

Here are some other service observations:

Flight attendants, paid to look after your safety—not your diet or your thirst—know more about service than most waiters. They are galley slaves, not lifeguards.

At sea level, waiters recite specials robotically, a manner that insults the hard work of the kitchen, the intent of the owners, and trivializes the efforts of the chef.

Wine lists are offered either reluctantly or apprehensively, as in, “I don’t suppose you’d like to see a wine list, would you?”—the assumption being that no one in your party looks like someone who drinks wine; or, on an outside chance, will order it if he or she does.

Slow service is excused impolitely: “I’m sorry, we’re awfully busy” or, worse, “Please, sir, can you not see how busy we are?”

The jargon of a restaurant ought to be its best-kept secret—a way for employees to short-hand talk among each other—yet it often shows up in menu descriptions that defy interpretation, yet which management assumes to be perfectly clear. There continues to exist that specie of guest that does not dine out daily and still needs help understanding a menu’s meaning even if it’s only the shade of difference between the left and right sides.

Too, even in some of the best places (they do exist, they do exist), where service is friendly and accommodating, waiters are not sufficiently trained to explain even the simplest dish. Apologies such as “I’m not sure; let me ask the manager or the chef,” serve only to draw attention to the restaurant’s shortcomings.

The clockwork mutterings of a prepubescent order-taker at a fast-food restaurant are as bad as the condescending greetings of a waiter (at any restaurant) whose chirpy enthusiasm for self-indulgence—“Hi, I’m your waiter, Al”—ought to be neutralized with a punch in the nose. That is not service; that is swapping the absence of service for corn.

Glorious exceptions to surly service exist all over, but they are few and far between. Cherished for the moment and recorded indelibly for posterity, they serve to remind me of what it’s really like (or what it was really like) to enjoy a meal away from home.

When service was wonderful and all was right with the world, my only anxiety when dining out was the anticipation of the check; now, that’s compounded by the gloomy prospect of awful or, at best, inattentive service.

1^st Nationwide Network is a bank company. It sells all of the things we’ve come to expect from a bank plus one other: service. Here’s a headline from an ad it’s running, “We’ll treat you with respect, concern, and understanding. But don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”