You know you’re a foodie when…

…you’re watching Tony Bourdain in Vienna and you say, “He’s drinking out of a Spiegelau wine glass! It’s an “Authentis” Burgundy glass! Why is he drinking white wine out of it? And hey, I’ve even got one of those glasses”!

That’s when you say to yourself, “Have I’ve gone too far? Am I a lost boy”?

That’s on top of me going to a new Vietnamese restaurant this afternoon and being disappointed with the  Bánh mì sandwich and the vermicelli dish that you find in most Viet restaurants (you know the one – it’s got cut up pieces of spring roll, cilantro, grated carrots, “BBQ pork”, ground peanuts and a side bowl of sweetened fish sauce. First of all, the Bánh mì barely had any crunchy bits like cucumber and carrots, and had some very stalky cilantro stuck in the middle. The pork was the requisite reddish color but had hardly any flavor. Plus, it wasn’t even cut in the middle. Sad. Then, the vermicelli dish had some sad bits of cilantro and a sprinkling of carrots and almost indiscernable cucumber, the fish sauce tasted more vinegary than sweet, and the spring rolls were basically Chinese spring rolls (I don’t know what makes them different, but the Vietnamese spring rolls you usually find in the dish are far more succulent and tasty). But the final insult was the fact that the vermicelli was overcooked and comprised most of the bowl instead of having a good ratio of noodles to “good bits”. Oh wait, I forgot – I had to send back the lemonade because it was a commercial mix  instead of that really good “homemade lemonade” that you find in a good US Vietnamese restaurant. Hell, it even said “homemade lemonade” on the menu. I told my waiter that it tasted like Countrytime and she told me that it was actually Minutemaid.

I turned into one of those passive-aggressive diners that we waiters all hate, only I dropped the “aggressive”. I couldn’t bring myself to tell the very nice, accommodating waiter that it wasn’t her fault but her restaurant’s cuisine sucked eggs. I was hard enough for me to send the flipping lemonade back ($2.75 – are you kidding me??!!??)

I feel badly because I won’t be going back, especially since there are three good Vietnamese restaurants within 3 blocks of there. I feel especially bad because I didn’t have the heart to tell my waiter. I’m a baaaaddd diner.  But even worse, I feel weird that I had such emotions over a $10 lunch. I guess that makes me a foodie of sorts – a foodie on a budget.

God, somebody please help me…

Pet Peeve

Unnecessary doubleseats.

Don’t get me wrong – doubleseats are part of the routine. Waiters should be able to handle them when they occur. Hell, I’ve posted quite a few strategies about handling them.

What annoys me is when managers or hosts or hostesses doubleseat when they don’t have to. The mindset is that waiters should be able to handle any doubleseat and that’s true enough.

However…

…a doubleseat should actually be a last resort.

Why, you might ask. Well, it’s simple. It’s automatically offering worse service than if you didn’t get doublesat. Even though it goes smoothly most of the time, you can’t give your full attention to each table, especially at the beginning of the meal. Plus, it sets you up for getting doublesat all night long.

What happens if one (or both for that matter) table is especially talkative? What happens if one of your tables needs special attention such as helping with wine selection or having to serve two or more wines?

And imagine if you get a third or, god forbid a fourth table on top of the doubleseat before you even get the first two’s orders taken?

Despite the fact that waiters should be able to handle double-and-tripleseats, managers need to change their mindsets and stop thinking that “it doesn’t matter”. Managers should avoid doubleseat until there is no other clear choice. About a month ago, I actually got doublesat as the first two tables in the entire restaurant at the beginning of a shift. While it was no big deal in terms of service, that meant that there was no real sense of rotation. Our restaurant doesn’t get sat in any sort of real rotation since we have more than our share of call parties and regulars who have to sit at a particular tables. But really guys – can’t you think a little bit before you seat the first two tables in the same sections? Really?

Sometimes hosts and hostesses and other seating authorities have to move someone who doesn’t like their table. This can throw off the rotation, but the seater should be flexible and be able to figure out how to get the rotation back.

Most of the time, it’s just laziness. As I said, it’s the manager’s mindset that waiters should be able to handle doubleseats so they don’t bother to demand that their hosts and hostesses or they themselves prevent it from happening. When it gets busy, you don’t have much of a choice. But when you have 10 waiters and three of them get doublesat before the restaurant is even half full, you’re just setting people up for failure and you’re being slack in your responsibility to provide the best service that you can.

Managers, are you listening?

For waiters, here is an archive post about handling multiple tables:

https://teleburst.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/managing-the-weeds/

And this post has a description of the sort of paces that you get put through when getting double-and-triplesat and some more strategies about handling such situations:

https://teleburst.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/skills-a-server-needs-pt-1/

Picture: http://magnitudemedia.net/2010/04/bringing-social-media-into-a-restaurant-time-grid/