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| An (almost) empty restaurant. Photo: Daquella manera, 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 fifth in a series of posts.
When a hostess beckons diners into a restaurant, her standard greeting is "Let me show you to your table." But to the chagrin of staffers and customers alike, a seemingly increasing number of eaters are taking the "your table" idiom quite literally. They exercise what some might call a sense of entitlement, threatening to disrupt service and the reservations system.
Traditional restaurant etiquette holds that diners behave as though they were seated at someone else's house: That's why we in the industry call them "guests." But as the cost of eating out has gone up and its novelty has faded, formality has given way to a different model. Diners now comfortably rearrange restaurant furniture, rarely asking permission to push tables together, park chairs in aisles or stick unwanted planters, vases and votives where they don't belong.
Self-appointed interior decorators are a headache for us servers, who have to contend with the diners in our paths. Still, that's an inconvenience most pros can handle. The bigger problem is customers who glibly overstay their welcome, assuming the table belongs to them until they deign to leave it. These campers are responsible for too-long waits at hostess stands and a tremendous amount of aggravation.
It's not just servers who suffer when a pair of iced-tea drinkers stays put: Since restaurants can't sell another entrée until a new party replaces them, such leisurely eaters help inflate menu prices (OK, maybe not by much, but we're all checking our sofa cushions for stray change these days).
Other than subtly scowling in the direction of the offending table, there's very little restaurant workers can do to discourage camping, which is why it's incumbent upon diners to police themselves. An unwritten rule -- at least to many servers -- is that there's a basic equation underlying how long a customer "owns" his or her table, but few diners seem to know it. It goes like this: $1 in food and drink equals one minute at the table. That would mean dinner for two at a mid-range casual chain like Red Lobster would last about 42 minutes (server errors and kitchen foul-ups excepted, of course.)
Not everyone agrees with this, but from this server's perspective, it's an eminently fair model, since it works out to just about minimum wage: Counting prep and clean-up, the hypothetical Red Lobster server will recoup $8 for an hour's worth of work. While we servers understand that diners have a real need to relax after a long day, my co-workers and I figure you're paying for food and service, not a hotel room. That doesn't mean a restaurant isn't a good venue for a leisurely meal: It just means diners shouldn't let an hour or so pass after their plates, silver and -- depending on the busser's aggressiveness -- water glasses have been cleared.
But what do you think? Is this math totally off? Is it unfair for a restaurant to expect diners to give their tables back? Who really suffers when customers refuse to leave?
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