{"id":15622,"date":"2014-08-25T15:56:26","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T20:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=15622"},"modified":"2014-08-30T04:13:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T09:13:29","slug":"serving-food-by-jesse-yancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/serving-food-by-jesse-yancy\/","title":{"rendered":"Serving Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JesseYancyColumnHeader\"<\/a>Anyone who prides themselves on their patience and understanding should wait tables for a week or so to find out just how patient and understanding they really are.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many people are notoriously insensitive to workers in the food service industry; just ask any waitperson, bartender, or cook. Any given one of them doubtless has several stories to tell of rude and insensitive if not to say vulgar treatment at the hands of a patron. The business of food and drink is a service industry, and it\u2019s no coincidence that the word service comes from the Latin root servus, meaning slave. The food industry trains people to be servile, to cater to customers (and management) in an overtly deferential way because so much of a restaurant\u2019s livelihood depends on steady patronage. I\u2019m not suggesting that anybody who works in the business is at the beck and call of every S.O.B. with enough money to buy a hamburger, but some people certainly seem to think so.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her autobiography, My Life as a Restaurant<\/em><\/strong>, Alice Brock<\/strong>, owner of Alice\u2019s Restaurant, describes the situation well and offers a very human response:<\/span><\/p>\n

I am often accused of being rude to customers. Well, it\u2019s true, I am as rude as they are, only they don\u2019t always realize their behavior is inhuman: after all, I am in a restaurant and they are hungry, they drove all the way from Florida, they just want a sandwich, they just want to see Alice, they just want to look around, and take a picture, get an autograph, use the bathroom, introduce me to their dog, who is named Alice, have a cup of coffee, speak to the owner\u2026because this food-covered lady in work boots, who is so rude, can\u2019t possibly be the owner. I guess I have a temper\u2026good! I won\u2019t stand for being treated like a piece of public property or a freak and I will never allow a customer to get away with giving an employee a hard time. The customer is not always right.\u00a0 Being a \u201cservice industry\u201d makes people think we are just computerized slaves.
\n<\/span>
\nOne of the high-lights of an evening is to hear of a customer bringing a waitress to tears\u2026I rush out to the dining room, pull their plates off the table and point to the door: \u201cOUT\u2026OUT\u2026GET OUT AND LEARN SOME MANNERS!\u201d To try to please the \u201cdifficult\u201d customer at the expense of my fellow workers is ridiculous. Some people just have an attitude. They upset the waiter or waitress, who in turn upsets me, who in turn upsets the whole evening. It\u2019s not worth it to try to please or placate these bitter, unhappy people, better to put them out at the first sign of trouble. This is something I have to be there to do\u2026it\u2019s hard to tell or expect someone else to do it. Sometimes I\u2019m wrong, or the waitress is wrong, but better to lose a customer than a co-worker. (p.119)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Brock is a notable exception, I might add, since most managerial-type people treat their wait staff as expendable. And, to be fair, most people who eat out frequently learn how to deal courteously with waiters, but I\u2019ll be the first to admit that it is a learning process, not an instinct.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"waitress_blog\"<\/a>Nowadays, dining out is almost always coupled with another experience (a movie, a play, or some other sort of public entertainment) but at one time dining out itself was often taken as a singular occasion to be enjoyed on its own merits rather than as an appendage to another event. This happy time was when restaurants were successful not merely on the basis of turnover, but more on the quality of the foods they offered, the comfortable atmosphere they maintained and the genial clientele they accommodated. Great care was taken not only with the menu, which usually involved many courses designed to fit the season as well as the particular talents of the cooks and the general style of the restaurant itself, but also with the presentation, the service, the table, seating, lighting, and other elements of atmosphere. Such staging demanded a great deal of planning as well as much care in the execution.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have seen some degree of return to this tradition, but it is still rare to find a restaurant that does not cater to some abominable god of expediency. I\u2019ve often encountered difficulty when dining out and trying to take my time between one course and the next with a pause to have a bit of beverage and conversation because waitpersons tend to interrupt with an insistent, \u201cAre you alright?\u201d as if to say that by not yelling at them for not bringing the food immediately that they were falling down on their job. The reason for this is that waiters are programmed to turn over tables as quickly as possible and since most patrons have had the \u201c20% tip\u201d rule-of-thumb drummed into their heads, waiters are eager to get the ten or twenty buck tip and get you out in order to get the next ten or twenty bucks. (Me, I tip as well as I can; just want you all to know that.)<\/span><\/p>\n

To learn how to wait tables efficiently and unobtrusively is an art; I\u2019ve known some champion waiters from both sides of the kitchen doors, and I\u2019ve been subject to the attentions of some world-class bartenders (be nice, people). Yet some customers, out of ignorance or stupidity, will exhaust and demean a good waiter, detracting not only from their own enjoyment of a meal but also from that of others. (Bartenders, on the other hand, just will not put up with a bunch of bullshit.)<\/span>
\nPerhaps what I\u2019m describing is simply an example of what is being called a decline in civility, but, as Alice says, \u201cSome people just have an attitude,\u201d and in my book as well as hers, such people simply require an adjustment. This, you understand, takes patience and understanding.<\/span><\/p>\n

To a point. \"The<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who prides themselves on their patience and understanding should wait tables for a week or so to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":15628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-food"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/ServingFoodFeat.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}