Waiting Game

[Chad]

Thank you so much for being here. I've just read The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must've Been Something I Ate back to back and enjoyed them very much.

In "Waiting Game" in The Man Who Ate Everything, you attended waiter's school to learn the tricks of the trade. Along with learning where the fish fork is placed you learned about upselling, not filling water glasses in order to sell bottled water, pushing a particular dish, the waiter's desire to "control" the interaction with the guest and other waiter Jedi mind tricks. Were you outraged? I was. I would've stabbed the waiter/instructor with a fork (if I'd known which one to use ).

Did the experience change the way you deal with waiters in restaurants? Have you developed any counter strategies that we should know about?

Chad

[Jeffrey Steingarten]

Dear Chad,

For the first year or two after learning the pernicious skills that waiters learn to make more money, I was probably pretty offensive. But as you spend more time eating out, you change. You don't become nice, heaven forbid, but you become kinder. Waiters should try to sell you more food--but not upsell, as you call it. After all, you'll be happier eating more food. You probably forgot to order those extra dishes, or maybe the women at the table embarrassed you into ordering as though you were at a spa. Maybe they said, If we're still hungry we can order more later. And you never do. I like waiters who try to interest me, in words a food writer would admire, in more and more good food.

There are still things I can't stand, and I respond with corrective action, though with kinder words. Waiters who keep on pouring the wine must be told that this practice is bad for the wine in the glass, bad for the wine in the bottle, bad for them as professionals, and bad for them as human beings. A phrase or two must suffice, however. And waiters who act as they know more about food than you--except on those occasions when they really do, especially perhaps in a little corner of the food world such as, say, bread pudding--must be squished like an insect, but only in the calmest way. In my cruel youth, I would drop a series of bunker-buster bombs right into their spider holes. Now I simply ask them a few quiet questions. Those who don't get the point are hopeless,--exceptions to the Buddha's statement that "There are no unsuitable candidates."