Having worked as a chef in seven countries, chef David Larousse thought he’d seen most of the bad service the world had to offer.
Until an American waitress asked him flirtatiously, “What cologne are you wearing?” while ignoring his sweetheart seated at the table.
“Can you imagine that? It was completely inappropriate,” says Larousse, author of nine books on food and restaurants and executive chef at Island Design and Architectural Center on St. Simons Island, Ga. The offense inspired him to pen a December commentary for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution railing against U.S. servers’ lack of tableside decorum.
“A lot of servers here don’t understand there’s supposed to be a professional distance between them and the diner,” he says.
From the oft-unwanted and overly robotic “Hi, my name is” introductions to asking incessantly if everything is OK, Larousse says servers are not only too personal with guests, many don’t understand how to anticipate guests’ needs by reading nonverbal cues. Instead, they resort to disrupting conversations and ruining the dining experience.
“I’m not saying don’t interact with me, but don’t interrupt me if I’m talking,” he says. “I don’t want to be your best buddy, I just want to have a nice dinner out with someone.”
Majid Ghavami trains his servers to respect that invisible line between being “friendly, but not too familiar” at the table. As the owner of Saffron’s Restaurant in Louisville, Ky., Ghavami’s servers often must speak to guests to describe the intricacies of his Middle Eastern food. So he teaches them to be articulate, but to the point.
“I hate to say it this way, but part of what I train them on is the philosophy of me, of how I treat the guest,” says Ghavami, a sturdy but soft-spoken Iranian who moved to the United States three decades ago. Nearly silently, he roams about Saffron’s dining room removing dirty plates, filling wine glasses, and greeting guests with little more than a warm handshake and a gentle smile. That understated service style won him “Best Host” in 2002 from Louisville Magazine.
“A lot of what I try to do is be there for the guest,” he says. “That’s mostly just paying attention.”
Paul Paz is a self-dubbed “career waiter” and service consultant who, at 60, works three days a week in a Tigard, Ore., restaurant. He says he believes many 20-and 30-something servers don’t know how to read a table like Ghavami, but he says they can learn.
“The No. 1 complaint I hear in my consulting work is young people don’t understand the basic etiquette of dining, and I can see that,” says Paz, owner of service resource
As products of a fast-food, meals-on-thefly generation, young people missed the etiquette instruction baby boomers got at their family dinner tables, he says.
The solution, he says, is for employers to commit to training staffs on those skills.
“I ask owners, ‘Have you ever sat down and had a meal with your staff and talked about the steps of service?’” he says. “‘Have you really talked much about the subtleties of nonverbal communication and how to recognize that?’ I find that many of them — even those who own multimillion-dollar restaurants — don’t do any of that. They just put new hires on the floor and tell them to follow somebody.”
Christopher Russell, general manager at Union Square Café in New York, blames most service problems on bad hires, not generational issues. Only some people are cut out to serve, he says, and diligent screening of job candidates is required to find them.
Three to four floor managers interview potential candidates before they get to Russell, and if they make it to him, the interview centers on one question: “If you’re waiting tables here, who, if they came into your station, would make you say, ‘Oh my gosh! I’m going to comp the meal and comp the tip just to show them what an amazing restaurant this is?’”
He then listens for a sincere willingness to please others through service.
“The requirement at Union Square is to have an internal desire to serve every single table that way, not just someone special,” says Russell, who’s boss, Union Square owner Danny Meyer, penned the book “Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.”
“To do well in the hospitality business, you have to get from giving,” he says. “The act of giving has to fill your tank emotionally. If not, then forget it. Get out.”
Ian Maksik believes many of the industry’s service shortfalls are understandable given the less-than-proper behavior of many American diners. A self-described optimist, Maksik believes people are as good-natured as ever, but he says many Americans lack the knowledge of how to dine. That ignorance, he adds, carries over to servers.
“I train service staffs all over the country, so I’m constantly watching people eat out,” says Maksik, a service consultant in Ft. Lee, N.J. “They’re holding a fork like they’re cavemen, and they don’t know how to use a knife. … Why is it like that? Because no one’s been around to teach these kids anything.Their parents are all working all the time, and they’ve learned to eat food with their hands at KFC and Burger King.”
But if the heart is humble and disposition hospitable, Maksik says, the hands and feet can be trained to serve.
“The minute they learn the physical aspects of service — which no one seems to train anymore — the server thinks: ‘I know my stuff. I can do this. I can open a bottle of wine. I can do 14 napkin folds and execute 20 service wows,’” he says. “With training we build confidence, with confidence we build sales, and with sales we build tips.”
Like Paz, Maksik says training is a hands-on experience that should be standardized for simplicity and consistency. A written manual is good, he says, but repeated physical demonstration is best. Not only do servers then learn, follow and repeat those standards, guests also know what to expect.
“You respect your server by spending time training him,” he says. “When I have to have my appendix taken out, don’t give me a doctor who’s watched a few other doctors take out an appendix, give me the one who’s been trained to do it. That’s the level of training we teach, and it’s the one that works.”
Russell insists teamwork is essential on a service staff and that tip pooling is crucial to eliminating any selfish server mentality.
“When you work at a tip-pool house, it’s a like a mutual fund,” he says. “All boats rise with the tide, and everyone gets better by working together.”
Paz trains servers to view themselves as businesspeople with set sales goals to meet. But he stresses that they should never put goals before guests.
“You don’t want them focused just on raw volume and thinking, ‘I might piss off a bunch of folks today, but I’m putting dollars on the books,’ ” he says. “You do want them to check reports on the POS to see where they are measured against their goals. It gives them immediate feedback to know if they’re succeeding for the business.”
Larousse says he longs for the day such service becomes standard in the U.S., but for now he’s hoping to stay patient while things improve.
“One of these days I think I’m going to blow my top if a server interrupts me,” he says, laughing. “And I know I’m not the only one out there. When I wrote that [commentary] for the paper, I had lot of people e-mail me saying, ‘Right on, brother!’ ”