I have never forgotten a dinner I ate at Taillevent in Paris perhaps forty years ago.  I was with a family of friends at a big table slightly elevated, like a private room at the side of the restaurant. 

I was smoking a cigar with my cocktail – disgusting!   But no one objected.  As soon as I abandoned the cigar, however, a waiter arrived, covered my ashtray with another one, and whisked it away.  

I thought, “how classy.”

All through the dinner that followed – no matter what I thought of – another slice of bread, salt, more butter, a pepper grinder, a refill on water – someone waiting on our table thought of it too and satisfied my wish. No questions were asked.  No one interrupted the conversation.  I’ve never understood how they did that, and I have never forgotten it. 

I have only one time again had such refined, attentive service – at Charleston in Baltimore where the dining room had a service station around which the waitstaff clustered, watching their assigned tables for a hint that someone sitting at those tables might want something.

Today, things are different. Service is interruptions, steady interruptions. It starts with seating:

“My name is Arthur, and I will be your server tonight.”  

“Have you dined with us before?”

“No?  Well then, let me go over our menu for you.”

My friend Ashok Bajaj who owns eleven restaurants in Washington says that young people want friendly service and enjoy talking to the waitstaff about the menu.  They like knowing the waiter’s name.  Perhaps so. But I am not young and rarely go to restaurants with young people.  So I wish the waiter would anticipate my wishes too.  

Perhaps he could ask, “Would you like me to go over the menu with you?”

I would say, “Thank you, but let me look at it first.”

I go to restaurants to taste food I wouldn’t or couldn’t have cooked at home.  I went to l’Avant-Garde in Georgetown not too long ago because it was offering a lobster tasting menu.  I go to Kinship for the same reasons – because Eric Ziebold is such a good cook, often of foods I don’t cook at home.

I also go out to dinner for conviviality, to visit people with whom I want to spend an evening without getting up and down to finish and serve food. But I do not go to restaurants to talk to the restaurant staff, so I don’t like my dinners to be continuously interrupted.

“Is everything alright?”

“Is everything to your liking?”

To be frank, I find it to be disruptive to an otherwise pleasant experience. 

A number of years ago I made a sign for myself that I carried to restaurants whose service seemed too intrusive for me.  I put it up after my server came more than two times to my table and stood there waiting until I gave up my conversation so that she or he could interrupt us simply to ask, “Is everything alright?”

My sign, that I propped up against a water glass said, “If everything is not alright you will be the first to know.”  Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post’s restaurant critic, wrote about this and received a flurry of scathing emails asking how anyone would be so rude and unkind to restaurant staff.   

They were right.  I thought that the sign was funny, but it wasn’t.  It was my impatience at work.  I didn’t want to be interrupted, but I should have realized that it could be seen as rude to staff.

But how did all this happen, I wonder?  Why can I not be left alone in restaurants – or with my friends to enjoy a meal? And why am I the bad guy for not wanting to engage with the wait staff because I’d rather spend my time engaging with the people I know? 

That’s why I go out to restaurants.

When I arrive at a restaurant, I love it when the waiter just hands a menu to me, and says, “Our specials tonight are…. If you have questions, let me know.  May I first get a drink for you?”  I would like him to return with drinks, and say, “What may I get for you tonight?”  Then, if I have questions about the dishes, I will ask him.

That seems to me like a professional relationship.

I do not want a recitation of the menu.

“You’ll notice that our menu is divided into three parts:  First are the appetizers that are smaller in volume than the next category, the main courses…”   

I prefer spending time over drinks and negotiating with my tablemates, saying, “If you get that, I will get this – and we can share.”

When the waiter returns to the table with our appetizers, I don’t want him to tell me what appetizers I ordered. I know what I ordered. I certainly do not want him to tell me what is in the dish.  The menu told me that.  I am old, I know, but I probably have not forgotten what the menu said to me.

If I leave on my plate part of the appetizer to save room for the main course, I don’t want the waitstaff to ask me “are you still working on that?”  And I don’t want them to grab my dish because it’s empty and take it away while others at my table are still eating theirs.

I do not want the server or the busser coming to my table every few minutes to pour more water from the bottle of purchased water or more wine into my glass.  I know – everyone knows – that this is a transparent effort to sell another bottle. 

And besides, I always feel that I should thank the server each time when what I really want is to take the bottle off the table so that he/she can’t find it.

I have done that before.

What happened?  How did waiting on tables become a performance art? 

This is what I want (and I am not meaning for it to be rude):  To be left alone.  Let me enjoy your food and my friends.  Keep an eye on my table, just look over every few minutes as you work with other tables.  If you do that, you’ll notice that someone at our table wants something – a saltshaker, more water.  You’ll know that by their looking up from the table and making eye contact with you.  

This is what I think of as good service. Anticipating the needs of others is an art.