Top Of The Table

Christopher De Voss

Oct. 7, 2001

We get letters like this sometimes, more than I would like to admit.
Read below:

Sarah
Los Angeles, CA

I would like to put my two cents in about the service I recently got at TGI Friday's Restaurant. My husband and I waited about TEN minutes before we were seated. Then we were brought the wrong food. Instead of apologizing, the waiter just says "oh". We then wait about twenty minutes to get our order. We are never asked if we would like our drinks refilled, and it took forever to get our check. The place was fairly empty. To top it off, several waiters were standing around singing along with the song playing in the restaurant! I thought this was just an isolated incident. I go to another TGIF's in Santa Clarita, same bad service, etc. It's getting to the point to where this is the exception and not the rule. My husband and I frequent restaurants where the service is great even if the prices are a bit higher. Here are my requests for all waiters out there and I'll definitely give you a good tip.

1) Don't act like you're doing me some favor by taking my order or you're in a bad mood.

2) If you make a mistake simply say "sorry about that". If there's a problem in the kitchen and it'll take a while for my food just let me know!

3) Ask me how I'm doing. Maybe I want a drink refill.

4) Don't socialize with the other waiters in the corner. I don't need to hear about your personal life or listen to your rendition of the latest song.

5) Don't take forever to bring my check-you can turn over your tables faster if you bring the check right away.

My first response, and yours, is to say, "Well, don't dine at Friday's." Ok, now that that's out of the way, Sarah does have some legitimate complaints. Sadly, we receive e-mails regularly with the same complaints.

Servers tend to have a certain personality, and I am not sure what classification you could put that in, but it takes a certain "something" to do this job. We will call it an "A" personality. This personality trait is needed in order to be a great, friendly, efficient, server, but tends to get you in trouble also. I get in trouble a lot when I'm wearing my waiter hat, but not so much with my consultant hat in place.

Remember whenever you are out on the restaurant floor, people can see you. Pay attention to people dinning. At some point in their dinning experience, they look around. I don't know why, but everyone does it. Whether it's a party of two or twenty, at some point, people pause in what they are doing, usually before the food arrives, and look around. When you dine out, you'll catch yourself doing it too. When you catch yourself, I want you to say, "Oh my God, Chris was right. I'm looking around." I mostly like to here the "Chris is right part."

What do they see? Well they see what Sarah saw. You. You singing. You gossiping. You cracking jokes, picking your nose, hitting on the hostess, talking about your bleeding sores, cleaning your fingernails, chewing gum, smacking your teeth, looking at racing forms, or whatever. Keep all that stuff out of view of the guests. If your side stations are in view of the dinning room, remember that's part of the viewed dinning room. You can participate in all that other stuff, just do it out back behind the restaurant, or behind any thick wall that the guest can not see through. Managers, don't be frustrated with these activities, you can't stop them…just hop on your horse and corral your servers into an acceptable idiot area. You can't fight with Personality "A" types; you end up banging your head against the wall. Like a record producer with his artists, you have to give some creative license up for good service. The best thing you can do is make sure you have a "play" area all set-up.

The rest of the complaints in the letter are basics. I'm not going to go over those; most of you know she received bad service. She is right on the point of the higher priced restaurants tend to give better service. It's not so much as the casual restaurants hire bad servers, because a lot of great servers do work at Friday's, it's more to the fact that the higher priced restaurants have servers working who are career servers. They like waiting on tables and make great money doing it. A lot of casual restaurant servers are waiting for "real" jobs and miss out on some great tips due to their attitude. While your waiting for your "real" job, try making some money with your "A" personality.