Saw this on huffington Post this morning, and it got me thinking about something that happens in restaurants so often that I shudder to think about it…..
It was posed to me this way, in a job interview a couple of years ago. “It’s nine o’clock on a Friday night, and the owner’s brother just walked in the door. He will only sit at table 38, and there is a couple sitting there. You have to move them. What do you do?”
“Does he have a reservation?”
“No.”
“Does the owner’s brother do this often?“
My two interviewers exchange a knowing glance.
“Oh yeah. At least once a week.”
“What course is the couple on?”
“Entrees.”
“I’d tell the owner’s brother to sit at the bar and wait for the table. Or he’s welcome to have a different one.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I’d tell him that I’ll hold that table for him every night until 8pm, but if I don’t see him or hear from him by 8pm, I’m seating another guest there.”
“That would never work.”
This restaurant is the sort of chic place that most diners can only afford to patronize once a year. That the owner’s brother comes in once a week, and insists on throwing his weight around makes me want to accommodate him less.
The three of us sat at a plush table, staring one another down for the next three minutes. I know how they want me to answer, and they know that I am not happy with that answer. The answer they are looking for is– I would move the couple to a private dining room or another table for their dessert course, and for their trouble post a hefty comp on their bill. Possibly even comp their entire check.
I had never even considered this practice until I started managing restaurants on Los Angeles. No other city I had ever worked in would so eagerly cow-tow to the whims and peccadilloes of one abusive guest. It’s something that can be so commonplace in Los Angeles that the other night, an inebriated patron waiting for a specific table shrieked at me that “she knows how this works, you buy those people a drink and make them move!” She proceeded to tell me that I am “beyond an idiot if I think she is going to sit at that other table” that I had offered her twenty minutes before and she didn’t like.
I guess I am beyond an idiot. Because I thought we were talking about a table, not debating abortion law or whether the moon landing was staged.
As that banshee-woman was bugging her eyes out at me, I had to grit my teeth. I have a loud laugh that carries like a foghorn, and a well-dressed middle-aged lady throwing a tantrum in public about a table is just too ridiculous for me to take seriously. Luckily, her husband shepherded her back to the bar and the guests sitting in the booth the banshee wanted cleared the table shortly after.
But here’s my policy, and here’s what I said in that interview two years ago:
I don’t move people. Once they’re seated, they’re seated. If that makes someone want to fire me, then so be it.
So, good on you, anonymous Nobu manager for insisting on some basic level of human decency and civil behavior. And thanks Huffington Post for spreading the word.
OTOH, if I was at Nobu Malibu, and Brooke Burke wanted our table, I’d move STAT and take that (full) comp. Plebs aren’t rich. Give me the free meal so i’ll go home and say proudly: hey mom, thanks to Mel Brooks, that Nobu meal was FREEEEE.
@sinosoul, I’ve never encountered Brooke Burke, but I bet she’d never ask you to move for her. Most successful celebs that I have had the pleasure to welcome into restaurants have much more class than to request that other guests be moved in order to accommodate them.
The most gracious guests I have ever seen? Julia Roberts, Leonardo Dicaprio, Bob Saget, John Stamos, Reese Witherspoon, Joni Mitchell (lovely lovely lovely, and her assistants are lovely, too), Halle Berry, Giselle Bundchen, the guys from the Big Bang Theory, and the cast from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. David Arquette has always been great and is also an amazing tipper. Drew Carey is wonderful and incredibly generous as well. I know he gets a lot of bad press, but the times I have had Jeremy Piven as a guest he has also always been lovely. The customers who feel the need to try and crow-bar “lesser guests” out of the corner booths are usually insecure in some way and need to yell at a restaurant manager or server or host, and try to throw their weight around so they feel like the master of some universe. It’s sad.
The times I have seen this move attempted by restaurant managers it invariably ends with the patrons who are being asked to move feeling like second class guests. Which is completely justifiable, I think. Which is why I never do it.
Hey! This is great! Good work. Thanks for sending it! Perri
Sent from my iPhone
Oh, Mary! I totally understand. Sometimes, you just want to tell people to go eff themselves! Like the time Ashton Kutcher pulled a “Don’t you know who I am” moment when cutting in line in front of about a dozen people for the truck, WHILE someone was in the middle of ordering.
Reese is absolutely lovely, as is Adam Sandler, Ben Affleck, and Jim Belushi. Helen Hunt on the other hand, threw a tantrum once while I was working at a place in Brentwood. She realized she’d forgotten her phone at home and needed to call her husband. Unfortunately the base of the phone we used was sort of stuck behind the counter so the best I could do was hand her the handset and offer to dial. (It had a cord. Not one of those new fangled cordless phones.) When she couldn’t remember the phone number she wanted to dial, the phone kept giving her the “you’ve had the phone off the hook too long, so we’d have to start all over. Finally she got upset with me and threw the handset at my head. This was while her daughter was left unattended in the dining room climbing on tops of tables and other furniture…
It makes a good story though. People love to hear that stuff!
Wow– that Helen Hunt phone story is atrocious! I have never had Ashton Kutcher as a guest, but I hear stories like yours from other RM’s that have. No wonder he has a reputation as an insufferable jerk-face.
Sorry that should have said, “‘phone off the hook too long’ sound…”