Icky icky garkon
T
hink of it as a peculiar kind of dance. A waltz of alternating leads. As with any dance there are ritual and tradition, forms that cannot be ignored. But for all of that there’s latitude for improvisation…
Such is the dynamic between diners and the floor staff who attend them. The accompaniment — menu, ambience, service style — provides both backdrop and foreground to the footwork through the evening. At times a Maitre d’ or sommelier may sense the need to backlead (an inexcusable liberty on the dance floor but a necessity of professionalism on the dining room floor). The experienced diner will follow their cue, seeing this for what it is — a subtle taking charge to avert any clumsy steps and refine all the time the progression through courses and wines.
As social animals we respond to the personal dimension, and especially to those extra attentions that make service an honor to the role and a gift to the recipient.
It is with the floor staff that diners have their direct contact. And it is the floor staff that diners see as making their evening (for better or worse, depending on their efforts). These are the interactions, ongoing through the entire night, that have the most immediate impact on the diners’ experience. (This is no slight on those toiling in the kitchen’s heat and chaos, but their labors are, for the most part, out of sight and in mind chiefly when their creations grace the table.) As social animals we respond to the personal dimension, and especially to those extra attentions that make service an honor to the role and a gift to the recipient. Service should never, however, be mistaken for servitude.
“In my philosophy,
a man cannot call himself well contented until he has done everything he can to
be of service to his employer”. Anthony
Hopkins speaks these words in the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of Kazuo
Ishaguro’s The Remains of the Day.
To do everything you can in the service of another. It is, it’s true, a self-negating sentiment. Its expression stiff and pompous. More than a little pathetic, some might think. And maybe so. Maybe worse, for a man to relinquish all satisfaction and passion and purpose to the needs of the one he waits on. Having given so much through a career of service, Stevens is left at the end contemplating, “I feel I do not have a great deal more left to give”. Fortunately this resignation doesn’t persist. He draws himself up once more, seeing that his life of service has been one passed devotedly. It is what he is, and aspiring to the highest standards elevates him (most importantly in his own eyes). This gives the man, and his earlier words, a genuine nobility through his enduring pride in his ideals of professionalism. Dutiful service as a vocation, and one that engenders its own sense of self respect. This is, at least in part and at heart in spirit, what’s felt by the most dedicated practitioners of hospitality. They too can claim a nobility in their own satisfaction being tied to what they see in their diners as these leave. Sending them away enriched by the experience (if a little poorer in pocket).
On the right night in the right place you can find yourself surrounded by this honorable ethic. A floor staff fixed on raising your evening’s dining to something sublime, their endeavors focused on that single aim (across all of the tables in their charge). It’s a shame that the service role isn’t always seen in that light — by patrons and by the service staff themselves. Jeffrey Steingarten, the self-styled “man who ate everything” — gourmand, Vogue food critic, and (drum roll) Chevalier in the Order of Merit for services to French gastronomy — writes of his experience at a celebrated service school that shall remain nameless (unless of course you read his book). A good deal of the course seems regrettably to have had too much of an eye on gouging the customer, honing (or exacerbating) the tendency in dining staff to what George Orwell referred to in Down and Out in Paris and London as “the pleasure of spending money by proxy”. While good staff will never ignore business imperatives, their aim won’t be so much to maximize a table’s check as to maximize that table’s overall pleasure, and so serve those diners with a final charge that seems positively paltry (or at least eminently fair) for their experienced raptures. It’s the difference between resourcefulness and duplicity. Steingarten reflects, “service has become an illusion”. A worthy notion in so far as illusion may polish the evening’s sheen to a greater brilliance, less so where it comprises a purely deceptive sleight of hand. So too with the course’s admonition “Controlling the Customer instead of the Customer Controlling you”. Genuinely adept service should never create a power play, a battle of wills. This isn’t subservience. Nor is it lost opportunity — the real opportunity cost is the diner who never returns. What it is, is being a pro.
“the man who prepares a banquet has as much to do as he who marshals an army…”
Service at table has a venerable history, and the responsibilities of the role have at times been far from humble. Take, for instance, the Renaissance appointment of scalco (“steward” in English, but that term fails woefully to do justice to the heroics demanded of one of the primary functionaries of a grand Renaissance household). The scalco was charged with designing and overseeing the great court feasts of the times. The position required the attributes of artist, director and even general. An enviable aesthetic taste, a dab hand with theater, a feel for ceremony and an imperturbable head for organization and logistics — no wonder the individual filling this bill was prized above all other servants by the aristocracy (including those who actually prepared the feast’s dainties — the age of the celebrity chef being still some centuries off). One Giacomo Colossi, holder of this exalted post for Cardinal degli Abbini claimed, “the man who prepares a banquet has as much to do as he who marshals an army…”
A Maitre d’ of today deploys troops which are, by comparison, more humble in their number. But scale is relative to expectation, and even the most demanding diners these days don’t assert their needs like a Medici (well, not quite). Competence in the role is taken for granted (as, more’s the pity, is the service role itself too often). Of at least equal importance is a Maitre d’s manner, which should possess a natural sweep and dash that is, at the same time, entirely unshowy. A good Maitre d’ requires a contradictory blend of deference and assurance (a combination that over time ensures a pathologically flexible sense of identity — a kind of career-spawned multiple personality disorder). When the mix and the mood is right, a Maitre d’ gifted in their craft can see to it that a good night is made a great one. A poor Maitre d’, however, can make of an otherwise satisfactory experience an extraordinarily dismal one.
Service staff now are, by the nature of the day, different to those of older times. They can’t adopt the airs of the Renaissance stewards. But neither are they the near-invisible “below-stairs” under class that waited on the English gentry. Their expertise is accepted and sought and valued — within the bounds of respective roles.
A barman is esteemed for quick wit and confidences. And no less for being an adept in the esoterica of alcohol. Then there is the enduring cliché (though clichés require their fair share of substance to become such) of the barman as folk philosopher. Relationship counselor. Career advisor. And a walking encyclopedia of politics and sport.
Many diners court the approval of the sommelier, and bask in the acknowledgement of a well-made choice, feeling their own stakes raised in the eyes of their dining companions. The sommelier will guide a diner, novice or initiate, through the cryptic convolutions of Old World and New, region, appellation, maker, negociant, viticulture, viniculture, vintage, variety, blend, style, flavor, nuance… and can always be counted on to unveil something entirely new to you.
A Maitre d’
may be treated by patrons as a near equal, even revered at those times when
they accomplish the seemingly impossible for a guest. In true tradition of their scalco forebears they are the evening’s
Master of Ceremonies. The best can lay
bare the least accessible and choicest recesses of what your night may
offer. (A kind of Virgil to the diner’s
Dante, through the various levels of Hell, Purgatory and
As to waiters, they are, it’s true, somewhat less highly honored. The best of them take this as an admittedly disagreeable part of their apprenticeship in the quest for higher station. And the best of them have that capacity not to be seen when it counts, and are able to give the impression of their service as omniscient but unobtrusive and never intrusive. (This discrete but ever-mindful manner is itself no small contributor to diners’ withdrawal into their own small worlds and immersion in the evening’s indulgence and artifice.) The more unsettled and those new to the role, while they find their feet and find their way, tend to respond to their relative lack of regard by characterizing one of two extremes. There are those who feel that a service role compromises their own dignity as an individual, much like the waiter in Zadie Smith’s book White Teeth, who fantasizes about wearing a placard around his neck that reads, “I am not a waiter. I have been a student, a scientist, a soldier, my wife is called Alsana…” — seeking to assert equality and the right to equal notice through a recitation of wider accomplishment. Then there is the type who doesn’t seek the approval of their diners because they are filled to the gills with self-approval (think of the aspiring actors and models biding their time in the restaurant game). They carry themselves like George Orwell’s French waiter — “Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan… And you could not help thinking… that the customer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him”. (Orwell nursed a particular antipathy towards waiters, as a result of his time as a lowly plongeur in French kitchens. His novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying contains a pivotal scene in which the hapless Gordon Comstock and his mistress are humiliated at lunch by a waiter of hyperbolic odiousness.)
Dedicated floor staff know, from both sides of the table, what effect a dinner out in a restaurant can have.
Dedicated floor staff know, from both sides of the table, what effect a dinner out in a restaurant can have. Something there as you stand up to leave that hadn’t been when you sat down (or something not there anymore). They are sensitive to the deepest levels of a diner’s, a table of diners’, experience. The things that can (or have) gone right or wrong. (So many, just think — a poor choice, a moment taken or not, something said that shouldn’t have been, something not said that won’t be, can’t go back and have it over again, it is now what it is…) They’ve seen it all, during all kinds of dinners. And they welcome their not inconsiderable responsibility, to make their own mark, by the best of their abilities, on a diner’s night out.
The dining room is, after all, a microcosm of the wider world.
The job is far from easy. Take, “the customer is always right.” That’s an industry truism that couldn’t be further from the truth. Customers are continually mistaken, ignorant, misinformed, bloody-minded and wrong-headed. A cool and seasoned head (read “professional”) is able to correct the customer’s impression… without alerting them to what’s actually happening. Making it seem that it was all their own idea. Some are harder than others, it’s true. And as far as service goes, there is an unfortunate miscarriage of justice. Many floor staff will tell you that they turn somersaults for the most pleasant and undemanding diners, and let the obnoxious ones stew some. But this is the world as we’d all like to see it, not as it is. Press them and they’ll admit that they rely on the forbearance of the decent diners in order to appease the painful ones (those with a manner persistently oily or affronted, incessant calls to their needs, garçon — they’re just that type — till you’d wish the cedilla would stick in their throats and choke them). And why shouldn’t they be as inclined as the next guy to the path of least resistance? Anyway, isn’t this so often the way in so much else — tantrums are rewarded with attention while the stoical are left to their own self-reliance. The dining room is, after all, a microcosm of the wider world.
Floor staff don’t hanker for accolades. Just the courtesy that’s their due in the service they provide their diners. You can be assured of this, and of their ablest efforts, in any restaurant worth its reputation. Whatever’s in their power to provide will be provided. As to anything else — just know you bring it, or bring it on, yourself.
This is an amended excerpt from the book The Psychology of Dining, by Evan Mitchell and Brian Mitchell, to be published in 2010. All rights reserved by the authors.
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Sources
Kazuo Ishiguro,
The Remains of the Day, Faber and
Faber,
Jeffrey
Steingarten, The Man Who Ate Everything,
Review,
Giacomo
Colossi quote taken from Roy Strong, Feast
— a history of grand eating, Pimlico,
George
Orwell, Down and Out in
Zadie Smith, White Teeth, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2001
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2000
