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| Photo: dan4th, Flickr. |
The debate this column fueled last week concerning the standard baseline tip isn't the sort of thing most servers spend much time considering: We'd all like our patrons to leave us lots and lots of money, thanks.
But that doesn't mean there aren't service issues upon which front-of-the-housers may never agree. I'm thinking here of doggie bagging, a practice that I've seen pit close friends against one another. The contentious question is who does the boxing.
At the white tablecloth restaurants where I've worked, it's understood that the task of wrapping a guest's half-eaten food in foil – ideally sculpted into a graceful swan – falls to the server (although since foie gras and lobster tail make for notoriously bad leftovers, many diners opt to have the vestiges of their five-star meals scraped straight into the trash.)
That's not always the case at slightly more casual restaurants, where many servers routinely plop Styrofoam boxes onto their guests' tables. As a veteran of fancy dining rooms, I always figured those servers were lazy. Turns out, they're looking out for their guests' interests.
Really? Because I can assure you that a server's hands haven't been in nearly as many suspect places as the hands belonging to the cook who patted your steak with salt and squeezed it to check its doneness. Yet many guests apparently feel a little proprietary about the food that lands on their table, and are no more thrilled by the prospect of a server neatly packaging "their" meal in a box than they'd be if a stranger opened their refrigerator and dipped a finger in the mayo.
What do you think? Do you prefer when the server whisks your food away and returns it in a box? Or would you rather handle the messy job yourself?
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