You'll get it when it's ready, and you'll like it

[Fat Guy]

Am I the only person who finds this practice incredibly annoying? It seems that more and more restaurants are opening -- especially the small plates and family style places -- where they refuse to let you determine the order in which your food will be served, or even to tell you the order. Rather, "The dishes come out as they're ready." Give me a break.

I first experienced this phenomenon at Asia de Cuba, a Geoffrey Chodorow-owned restaurant in New York, in the 1990s. In 2001, I wrote the following about another Chodorow project, Tuscan Steak:

Not content to stop at the complete failure of its central conceptual underpinnings, Tuscan Steak also introduces some neurotic policies, encapsulated in a little policy statement delivered by each server at the beginning of the meal: Welcome to Tuscan Steak, a new concept in dining. (Okay, though I have my doubts.) The restaurant is family style; that means the portions are large enough to be shared. (Fine, though it's not my favorite way to eat since I like my steak rarer than any of my friends.) And we bring the food whenever it's ready. (This requires follow-up questioning.)

"That is to say, sir, when the salmon is ready we don't keep it in the kitchen until everything else is ready -- we bring it right away. We might bring the salmon first; we might bring the steak first; or they might come together."

Let me explain something to those who run the kitchen at Tuscan Steak (and Asia de Cuba, which has the same ridiculous policy, is welcome to listen in): In a professional restaurant kitchen, there's this person called the chef, and when the chef is not around there's this other person, called a sous-chef or expediter. This individual gets the orders from the dining room and reads them and, owing to many hard years of professional culinary training, is able to theorize, for example, that the steak takes 20 minutes and the salmon takes 10, so if the meat cook starts the steak now and the fish cook starts the salmon in 10 minutes, they'll be ready at the same time. Or said chef/expediter is able to say, for example, that salmon has a lighter taste than steak, so it might make sense to time things so as to serve the salmon first and the steak 15 minutes later. But simply to process orders without any thought of sequencing or timing represents an unacceptable abdication of responsibility. It is also very annoying to the customer.

I thought for sure by now this trendlet would have died out -- surely, I thought, people won't stand for this for very long -- but it actually seems to be expanding.

So, from here on in, I refuse to eat at any restaurant that serves food in this manner. Unless someone else is paying.

[Reefpimp]

The people working in those kitchens should be ashamed to call themselves cooks. And be damned glad they aren't working for me. My only regret is all those waitresses going to sleep on pillows unstained by tears spilt as they relive how I tore them a new one for not putting their orders in correctly.

[Fat Guy]

When Hal Rubenstein mentioned this in his review of Spice Market (both Spice Market and "66," another of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurants, serve this way) he used the term "sequenceless."

[weinoo]

Yep, this is a most annoying "policy." The only place I accept it is Chinese restaurants where the food is usually brought out of the kitchen as it is cooked.

I also do not like it when a restaurant refuses to take your appetizer order while you are perusing the menu for dinner choices.

[markk]

I have a local Italian eatery that's been around for a long time, is owned by another very popular food business in town, and which serves the dishes when and as the kitchen serves them, and it' not family style. So mid-way through your appetizers, the waitress will arrive with your main courses and ask you to make room on the tiny tables (which is usually impossible without forfeiting the remainder of your appetizers). On other occasions, when only one of two people has ordered an appetizer (but both have ordered main courses), they'll serve one person's app. and the other person's main course together.

This very popular place seems to operate on the premise of "Hey, my dad's got a barn, let's put on a restaurant!" The couple of times we've said something to the young, energetic servers, they've replied "Um, we have no control over the kitchen" and "Um, well it's not like a real restaurant, you know".

Of course, it's unacceptable, but they don't know that, and apparently neither do the hordes of yuppies who wait in line for tables.

[moosnsqrl]

When Hal Rubenstein mentioned this in his review of Spice Market (both Spice Market and "66," another of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurants, serve this way) he used the term "sequenceless."

←

I was thinking more "artless" or "clueless." I wonder what they would do if you simply ordered only one thing at a time to circumvent their silly policy? But you're right, why bother? Just avoid them entirely. There are plenty of restaurants who deserve your patronage and know when to fire orders so everyone at the table can be served at the same time.

[Busboy]

I first stumbled into this policy at Legal Seafoods -- which is one of the reasons I've never liked the place -- 20-odd years ago.

I actually don't mind it at "tapas" bars -- munchies are munchies, even of they're really good -- but it is annoying at other places. One patch that can be installed is the old "why don't we just have the tuna carpaccio and the shrimp now, and we'll order the rest of the food later" ploy.

I am convinced, cynic that I am (and because I am almost certain this was the case at Legal's as I had a friend working there) that this policy springs in large part from the fact that it allows restaurants to hire less experienced, and thus less expensive, kitchen staff.

[Nathan]

I concur...with the exception that true tapas or cichetti places are exempt.

[Fat Guy]

The only place I accept it is Chinese restaurants where the food is usually brought out of the kitchen as it is cooked.

←

I can live with it in Chinese restaurants, because it's a when-in-Rome (China?) thing, but I definitely prefer at least a little sequencing to a Chinese meal and will often submit the order in two stages -- most restaurants don't mind that (though I hasten to add that if you try that at Spice Market or Asia de Cuba they'll say, "We need your order all at once."). I've actually found it to be more of an issue in non-Chinese Asian restaurants, though. Most Chinese places, even the ones in the Chinatowns that cater to a lot of Chinese, have adopted at least the notion of starters and mains (in an actual Chinese home, at least in my experience, EVERYTHING comes at once -- at once, as opposed to in random order), and that has also been my experience during the very little time I've spent in Asia. But there are plenty of Vietnamese, Thai, etc., places where they really do just bring stuff, so a little bit of forced sequencing is helpful. I prefer not to have a million things crowding the table at once, getting cold before you have a chance to try most of them.

[annecros]

I first stumbled into this policy at Legal Seafoods -- which is one of the reasons I've never liked the place -- 20-odd years ago. 

I actually don't mind it at "tapas" bars -- munchies are munchies, even of they're really good -- but it is annoying at other places.  One patch that can be installed is the old "why don't we just have the tuna carpaccio and the shrimp now, and we'll order the rest of the food later" ploy.

I am convinced, cynic that I am (and because I am almost certain this was the case at Legal's as I had a friend working there) that this policy springs in large part from the fact that it allows restaurants to hire less experienced, and thus less expensive, kitchen staff.

←

They also can do without an expediter, and can force the servers to run food at the same time they are waiting tables.

[Sneakeater]

What's weird is that I've noticed at many places lately (mainly casual or youth-oriented places, where I'm eating at the bar) they actually ask me, when I place my order, whether I want what clearly seems to be an appetizer to come first, or whether I want all my dishes at once. As if the whole idea of "courses" has disappeared. As if people actually PREFER eating that way. Has this gotten that far? Is this something that Young People understand but I don't? It's bizarre to me.

Edited January 5, 2007 by Sneakeater (log)

[slkinsey]

This practice, in my opinion, is just a lame excuse for not setting up a kitchen that is disciplined and organized enough to have the various dishes done and out to the table at the right time.

It's called an expediter, folks. Get one. Do what he says.

As for the Chinese food model, I have in practice rarely if ever found bad sequencing to be a problem. At New Green Bo, for example, the kitchen always brings out the dumplings and pancakes first, then the soup, then the more substantial dishes. Of course, the dumplings may not all be finished before the stir-fried rice cakes some out, but the nature of a Chinese meal of this kind is such that this doesn't really pose a problem. It's not a big deal to have another dumpling while eating the rice cakes.

[Fat Guy]

Does it really even require any special training or extra staff to get the food out in order? Doesn't it just require a coherent plan?

[NYC Mike]

This is one of the few things that will drop the tip and make me never go back.

I can't imagine that it is difficult to coordinate at all, the only thing that needs to be done is for the restaurant to agree with will be dont a certain way.

What it does change for a restaurant, and this is the really annoying part, is that if they modified these policies in favor of diners it would result in slower turning covers...

-mike

[Jon Tseng]

With respect (and I suspect in London this syndrome may not be as commonplace as in NYC) I would disagree with the views above.

There are several reasons why I, personally, couldn't care less when or in what order the food comes so long as it comes well cooked in hot. Obviously these are specific to myself - it is clear others disagree.

1) Order is overrated: To be honest so long as the savoury food comes before the sweet stuff getting food in a dictated hot/cold/soup/salad/main etc order is wildly overrated. There are two aesthetic reasons to want food in a particular order. Firstly small dishes (starters) before entrees - obviously this isn't an issue in a small-plate context. Secondly progression of flavours cold/hot/soup/entree etc - again this is overrated - as evidenced by the willingness of billions of people across Asia to scoff multiple dishes all at once. If you want to clear your palate between courses have a glass or tap water. Or go to the restroom and gargle with mint mouthwash. or whatever.

2) Pity the poor kitchen: OK you have a small plate restaurant with, lets say 80 covers in. 5 dishes per customer. Two sitting. Heck that's 800 plates going out through the swinging doors on Friday night. That my friends is a logistical nightmare. To be honest it strikes me a churlish to start carping about not having an expeditor or a well organised kitchen in that context. If you can get 800 dishes out a point in any order during a three hour service, believe me you've got a f**king organised kitchen, expeditor or not.

3) It may be just me but so long as the food as well-cooked hot and tasty that's enough for me. After all at the end of the day its all going to get masticated and come out the other end together, regardless of what order it goes in.

As I said that's just my view. The joy of the free market is that those who disagree are quite welcome to vote with their feet...

J

[markk]

Does it really even require any special training or extra staff to get the food out in order? Doesn't it just require a coherent plan?

←

I do think it requires an "expediter" in some form; even if I give the waitress my order and tell her "don't order the main courses from the kitchen until you see we've finished our appetizers", then she is acting as the expediter.

It's a lot easier to order course by course if you need to return to a restaurant where this happens.

And if they refuse to do it that way, well, I'd stop going.

I've also been in some Mario Batali restaurants (more than one) where I was going to graze, and was told that I had to place the whole order at once. So I simply explained that it was an emotional hardship for me to do that, and could they ask for an exception from the kitchen, please. In both cases, the server immediately replied, "sure, you can order as you go".

If it's my fault that the late ordered things take a while to come out, I accept that. And if doing it that way (grazing, I mean) takes up the table much longer than usual, I'll tip generously. But in a regular app/main restaurant, I expect them in sequence, and order so I get them that way, because I always pretend that I'm the customer and that in return for my money I should get the meal the way I enjoy it.

[Porthos]

I wouldn't dream of patronizing a restaurant, excluding tapas bars, that thought the serving order just didn't matter. Call it a control freak thing if you want, but I don't like surprizes. I have never ordered a meal in a low end or high end Chinese restaurant that didn't serve salad and soup courses ahead of the entrees; the people I eat with still prefer to share all of the entrees so entree order isn't such an issue.

For me, a major element of dining out is the ambience and the pleasure of being served. The lack of traditional serving order would detract from the more sublime elements of enjoying a meal out and also can present challenges to wine service when ordering multiple bottles to match the courses selected.

I have a 19 year-old daughter that would probably love such places. They fit very well with her "the way things have been done in the past must be wrong and should always, always, always be challenged!"

If perchance I ever end up in an "take it as you get it" establishment, I can guarantee that it will be my only visit and if I can extricate myself and my party before ordering without it upseting the other members of my party I will probably go find a meal somewhere else.

Porthos Potwatcher

The Unrelenting Carnivore

[vengroff]

I definitely prefer at least a little sequencing to a Chinese meal and will often submit the order in two stages -- most restaurants don't mind that (though I hasten to add that if you try that at Spice Market or Asia de Cuba they'll say, "We need your order all at once.")

So if you order a few plates, theoretically compromising your whole order, eat them, and then tell them you'd like order a few more, what happens? Do they kick you out of the place at that point?

That's my normal strategy for creating a sequence I want if I have reason to believe the restaurant won't normally do it. Of course it's less convenient than ordering all at once, but it's not that different than the very standard the practice of ordering cheese and/or dessert after the main meal.

[Fat Guy]

So if you order a few plates, theoretically compromising your whole order, eat them, and then tell them you'd like order a few more, what happens?  Do they kick you out of the place at that point?

←

You can sort of win that fight, however what happened to me when I tried it a couple of years ago was:

- Our server tried desperately to convince us that we hadn't ordered enough food to make up a sufficiently diverse and filling meal for ourselves;

- We stupidly replied, "Well, then, we might order more later";

- Every time he returned to fill a water glass or anything, he asked if we wanted to order anything else -- this started before any food even arrived;

- When we ordered more, he was visibly uncomfortable, presumably because his manager or someone in the kitchen was going to hassle him about turning the table and two-stepping the order;

- The other people I was eating with, who were typical conflict-averse citizens, eventually became uncomfortable too.

And really, I thought our server was a genuinely nice, well-meaning guy. He was clearly carrying out the restaurant's policy and just trying to make it work. So there wasn't even any perverse pleasure in torturing him.

[maggiethecat]

Welcome to Tuscan Steak, a new concept in dining. (Okay, though I have my doubts.) The restaurant is family style; that means the portions are large enough to be shared. (Fine, though it's not my favorite way to eat since I like my steak rarer than any of my friends.) And we bring the food whenever it's ready. (This requires follow-up questioning.)

"That is to say, sir, when the salmon is ready we don't keep it in the kitchen until everything else is ready -- we bring it right away. We might bring the salmon first; we might bring the steak first; or they might come together."

.

I'm still stuck on this. Family style?

Not in my family. Of course my mother (and I) make enough sides for everyone to share, but courses come out in sequence at the correct time and temperature. Granted the most cooking I do is for a largeish dinner party, but restaurants should have the staff and experience to do this for a room.

Bizarre.

[Fat Guy]

When you go to New Green Bo or an equivalent Chinatown restaurant where they use the avalanche method of service, you can purchase enough food to feed four hungry people for about $35 (or for $52 you can purchase enough food to kill them). Meanwhile at, say, Spice Market, there are individual dishes that cost $34 and $36, and a party of four is likely to spend $200+. It's not like you're getting a discount for this crappy service. You pay just as much as you'd pay to eat at a restaurant that serves your courses in order.

Also, while I do find some sequencing to be overrated -- and indeed I think foie gras is served at an illogical point in nearly 100% of fine-dining meals -- I also think there is value to sequence. Cold, raw and mild before hot, cooked and spicy just makes a lot of sense to me as a means of avoiding palate fatigue. There's also the relationship with wine -- while I'm a recently outspoken opponent of obsessive pairing, I do think the general progression from lighter to heavier foods and wines makes sense. And sure, if you just put all the food on the table, you can eat it in whatever sequence you want -- if you don't care about the temperature of your food. But there's a difference between all at once and random order. Random order sucks.

[moosnsqrl]

I find this beyond bizarre. More often than not, if there is any ambiguity at all (i.e. not a clear soup, app, entree - er, make that obvious rather than clear, to avoid confusion with consomme), the server will propose an order and then ask if that will be OK, giving a chance to alter it. The only exception being salad, which will nearly always be brought early if you don't specify a preference to the contrary, even in French restaurants here (which seems odd, but . . .).

Maybe someone should invite one of the practitioners of this new "concept" to participate in a "Spotlight" so we can have a dialog about it. I'd really like to know what they were thinking. If that's what they felt they needed to do to shake things up or differentiate themselves in the marketplace, I have to wonder what's next.

[Sneakeater]

I have a 19 year-old daughter that would probably love such places.  They fit very well with her "the way things have been done in the past must be wrong and should always, always, always be challenged!"

←

In response to moosnsqrl, the one explanation that I've heard from restauranteurs is that it fits in with the "modern concept of grazing/informal dining" and that "young people like it". And, I hate to say it, but anecdotal evidence gleaned from looking at other tables suggests that "young people" do like it. (Idiots.)

[philadining]

The majority of the Stephen Starr restaurants in Philly operate this way (and presumably Buddakan in NYC too) as do plenty more, as many of the exciting places to open recently around here seem to be in that small-plates zone.

On one hand, I actually quite like the "family-style" shared-plates thing, and having the dishes arrive randomly actually encourages this, unless someone really wants to sit sullenly, hungrily awaiting "his" plate.

On the other hand, I think there really is something to be said for progression of flavors, especially if one is trying to drink compatible wine. While I love the contrasts and variety offered by a large array of dishes in a typical Asian meal, given the even more diverse range of today's modern restaurants, the random order can result in some jarring clashes.

At a recent meal at Susur Lee's "Lee" in Toronto, we ordered 5 small plates between two of us. The very first thing to arrive was a piece of black cod with cantonese preserves, a dish I'd certainly thought of more as one of the "mains" as opposed to some of the other dishes, which felt more like starters or side-dishes. Next came a Feta tart, which I think I would have preferred to have first. Next was a really hearty Duck dish, then later some dumplings, and last a baked lentil dish, which I really would have preferred to have as an accompaniment to everything else.

Even with the random order, things came just fast enough that we ended up with all five dishes in front of us as once, which let to an awfully cramped table, a confusion of flavors, and things getting cold because we couldn't get to them in time. I've had this same problem at other places: being forced to either let something sit and get cold, or to dive right into it even if jumping between the flavors and textures of the other dishes is not ideal.

I'm fine with a variety of flavors, I don't need to finish my peas before moving on to my potatoes, but I don't always want a bite of ceviche followed by a forkful of pork belly, followed by a cured anchovy, followed by poached eggs....

Oddly enough, the one place I have NOT had this problem is Amada in Philly, a restaurant that is ostensibly serving Spanish Tapas, and therefore should not really be all that concerned about order and pacing. But I've found that even if one orders a huge pile of food, they'll bring it in a logical sequence, and nicely timed. I've even had service slow WAY down to correlate with the leisurely way we were grazing through the early courses, which I really appreciated. Might be one reason the place is so popular.

So I agree with most of the posts here, I'm generally not a fan of the "you'll get it when it's ready" style of service, mostly for the jumble of flavors that often results. But it is really quite unpleasant if one is dining with someone who's not into the sharing thing, and really just wants to eat "his" dish. The only thing I will say is that I do like getting everything hot, without anything sitting under a lamp for protracted times...

For whatever reason it doesn't bother me in the least if everything we order shows up at once in a Chinese place. More compatible flavors maybe?

Edited January 6, 2007 by philadining (log)

[K8memphis]

A little different facet on food 'sequencing'

I've tried to re-configure the sequencing to no avail.

Somebody shooot me I like to eat my protein first.

My experience has been that even when requested otherwise, the food is served when they want to serve it not when I request it to be brought. I hate to sit through my husband merrily chomping down a salad while I have all of a napkin corner to chew on in the meantime.

I will smile and say clearly, when you bring his salad, please bring my dinner. Or conversely, please serve my dinner at the same time he gets his salad. Believe me, worlds collide at such requests. Eyes bulge, confusion spreads across the servers newly moistened furrowed brow. That would mean that we both have to wait for food while they grill my fish. I can handle him getting one course like bread while I watch but not the dang salad too.

Or when one person has more time for the meal than the other. Happens at lunch all the time. So I arrive first and get the table. I say bring my xyz now please. Do not wait for my companion. Often doesn't happen, sometimes maybe.

So you say, "Send it back." if they bring his salad early. If he doesn't finish his salad, you know we'll never get our main course. And also one can't be too careful with your food. I've had a lot of time on my hands spent lonely and hungry while he's incomunicado stuffing salad while I imagine wait staff, dishwashers and cooks lined up to drool in my plate if I complain.