Just up the block from where I live in Chicago is an upscale Irish bistro that I visit regularly, though I wouldn’t call myself a frequent customer. A friend and I usually eat there in the early evening. Not once have we had a bad meal, and the martinis are exquisitely dry.
Immediately as we enter, the hostess greets us warmly, remembering us even though we might not have been there for a month. We’ve been going there since the restaurant opened three years ago and always have the same waiter.
He is always genuinely pleased to see us, always shakes my hand. We chat about the weather if Chicago had been hit that day with heavy snowfall or thunderstorm, discuss the White Sox and Cubs during baseball season and the Bears when it’s time to talk football.
The first time we went there we ordered salads before the meal, and they turned out to be larger than I like. On the next visit I ordered only one, and we planned to share it from the same plate. But our waiter figured that out and suggested he’d split it for us on separate plates.
He made the dining experience far more enjoyable for us than any server who waited on us, and the last time we went to the restaurant he wasn’t there. He had moved on.
We still had a great meal, but the mood wasn’t the same. We missed our favorite waiter and were sad he was gone. I’m sure other diners felt the same.
Did he go to another nearby restaurant, where perhaps we’d run into him? Or did he leave the business entirely?
I once wrote about my love of eating in diners, and there’s one we go to that seems more than happy to hire servers of Eastern European descent. The woman who usually serves us has an enjoyable accent, which I couldn’t be 100-percent sure is Polish. We like it, and we like her, and the last few times when we went to the diner she wasn’t there.
A story in the June 16 issue of Nation’s Restaurant News reported that with fewer customers dining out and leaving smaller tips, servers are making less money and deciding to leave the business for jobs that actually pay the bills.
In some cases operators are reducing the waitstaff because of declining customer traffic.
If I were the type of guy who gives advice, I’d suggest that operators find ways to keep their servers and find cost reductions elsewhere. I know, that’s easier said than done, and if I were an operator I wouldn’t want someone who never rose above the rank of busboy telling me how to run my business.
I just hope operators realize it’s true without a doubt that an individual server can affect the happiness of many.
