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| Photo: Jason Reidy/Flickr |
Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the first in a series of posts.
The first time I saw a fellow server settle into a booth with her customers while taking orders, I was seriously concerned.
I was a veteran of both high- and low-end cuisine, but had never seen such a thing. I immediately assumed she was too tired to carry on, and never suspected she was angling for a better tip.
As folks who ate out in the early 1990s may recall, researchers discovered in 1993 that sitting down with customers -- like drawing a smiley face on the bill or wearing a flower in one's hair -- was a sure route to a bigger tip.
Read on, plus a poll, after the jump.
("It makes the server seem friendlier," theorized authors Michael Lynn and Kirby Mynier, pointing to studies associating "postural congruence" and "eye contact" with good rapport.) In those pre-Internet years, the finding was disseminated through an informal network of restaurant workers, with servers across the country gradually adding the trick to their repertoire.
Many restaurant managers put the kibosh on the tactic, ruling that the approach violated the customer's right to personal space. But the habit has persisted in some quarters (namely, wherever my swift-to-squat co-worker is employed.)
It's no longer shocking when a server asks her guests to scoot over. But is it a good idea? If a waitress doesn't sit, is she hopelessly standoffish? Should a server behave like your best friend?
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