Waiter, There's a Bee in My Bonnet (Restaurants USA, December 1999)

December 1999 issue

Waiter, There's a Bee in My Bonnet

Restaurants USA magazine's final issue was published in September 2002 but these archived articles remain available for our readers' convenience.

Restaurants USA, December 1999

What irks noted chef Julia Child when she dines in a restaurant? Excessive noise and inadequate lighting are two of her pet peeves. And she's not alone. In fact, there are several other mistakes customers say spoil a dining experience and dissuade them from returning to the establishment. Here are some tips for making sure guests leave your restaurant pleased rather than peeved.
By Beth Panitz

For Julia Child, it’s noisy restaurants. “I hate those restaurants that are so noisy that you can’t talk. I like to be with my friends and talk, as well as eat and admire,” says the renowned chef. Dark restaurants and dishes piled too high with food also bother her.

Child might be in a class by herself when it comes to culinary accomplishments, but she is not so different from the typical restaurant customer when it comes to eating out. Like most people, she has certain pet peeves — things that irk her and may prevent her from returning to a restaurant.

“Pet peeves add stress to the guest’s experience and take away from the flow,” says Bob Brown, a restaurant consultant based in Herndon, Virginia, and author of The Little Brown Book of Restaurant Success . Restaurants might never even know it when they’ve hit a nerve with a customer. A 1993 MasterCard International study found that nearly 80 percent of dissatisfied customers never register a complaint. Instead, they just don’t return to the restaurant. According to the MasterCard study, three out of four people who have a bad dining experience never return to the restaurant, and on average, they tell five people about the incident. In other words, it makes good business sense to rid your restaurant of any annoyances.

Following are seven common pet peeves along with some advice on how to avoid these problem areas.

The interminable wait

One of the most annoying ways to start a dining experience is with a long wait to be seated — even worse is when the wait for a table is longer than expected, says Edward Solomon, a restaurant consultant in Lorain, Ohio, and author of Serve ’Em Right: The Complete Guide to Hospitality Service . “Sometimes the restaurant says there’s going to be a 20-minute wait, and then there turns out to be a 30- to 45-minute wait. That’s a pet peeve for some people. It can get them irritated. And when they’re irritated, the food [when they do finally sit down and get served] doesn’t taste as good to them; they’re harder to please.”

To avoid false promises, Solomon says that when he owned and operated McGarvey’s restaurant in Vermilion, Ohio, he always avoided telling customers an estimated waiting time. “Instead, we would say something like ‘We’re now seating people who arrived at 7:05.’ That way it gives them an idea of the wait without committing to a time,” he says.

Of course, an easy way to reduce the time customers have to wait for a table is to take reservations, says Mary Austin, general manager of Magnolias in Charleston, South Carolina. Magnolias avoids overbooking to ensure that guests with a reservation can be seated on time, she says. The downside, says Austin, is that some customers change their dinner plans without canceling their reservations. Fortunately, Magnolias gets enough walk-in customers to make up for unannounced cancellations, she says.

Because of the potential problem of no-shows, some restaurants do not accept reservations. A compromise method increasingly used by restaurants is call-ahead seating. With this system, customers call the restaurant before they leave home to be added to a waiting list. By the time they arrive, there is little or no wait before they can be seated.

When a wait is unavoidable, the staff should make it as pleasant as possible, says Solomon. For example, McGarvey’s staff would invite guests waiting for a table to have a drink or an appetizer on the restaurant’s patio, which overlooked a river. “They didn’t mind the wait, because it became part of their dining experience,” he says.

Service is out of sync

“People want a rhythm [when dining out]. . . . When that stops and there’s an interruption, people get worried,” says Leon Gottlieb, a restaurant consultant in Tarzana, California. To maintain a steady rhythm, restaurants should offer a simple menu that allows all meals ordered at a table to be served simultaneously at proper temperatures. For example, when Gottlieb was vice president of national operations and franchise sales for IHOP Corp., based in Glendale, California, company policy specified that all menu items should be ready to serve in about six minutes.

When the menu items ordered are not served at the same time, customers often switch gears from enjoying a pleasant conversation to griping, uttering witticisms like “Why is our salmon taking so long? What are they doing—fishing for it?”

If a particular item requires a long time to prepare, servers should alert their customers to that, recommends Brown, by casually saying something like, “By the way, your entree will take a little while to prepare. While you’re waiting, there’s a great appetizer that you might want to share.” The result: fewer agitated customers, bigger sales and higher tips.

“Slow service often comes from bad systems,” adds Brown. “Management can set up things for success.” For example, managers can require servers to greet customers within a minute after they’re seated and to precalculate checks so that they’re ready when customers want them. They can also avoid assigning too many tables to one server. “Servers usually want to have a lot of tables so that they can make more tips,” says Brown, who worked as a waiter for 16 years before becoming a restaurant consultant. “What I found is that you can actually make more when you have fewer tables, but you serve them well.” Managers should also schedule enough kitchen workers and should hire food runners — staff members who help take food to the tables — if needed.

True to its name, downtown Seattle’s Jackrabbit restaurant emphasizes speedy service. Every weekday, the quickservice restaurant serves 1,000 to 2,000 people for lunch — mostly office workers looking to grab a sandwich or salad and go, says co-owner Peter Cassidy. He’s found that customers don’t mind a short wait as long as the line is moving. “If they don’t see us hustling — that’s the killer of them coming back,” he says. “If you’re moving and you have enough staff to handle the crowds, they’ll understand.”

Getting it right from the start

“I just want it the way I want,” explains Sally Albright (played by Meg Ryan) when discussing her excessive menu requests in the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally. Although it can be frustrating to deal with high-maintenance customers like Sally — who want everything “on the side” and have a long list of special instructions — customers do have the right to get what they want, within reason.

“When they ask for turkey, yellow mustard and no mayo, they don’t want honey-dijon mustard, and when they get back to the office and find out that’s what you put on it, the sandwich is no good to them,” says Cassidy. To reduce mistakes, Cassidy and his co-owner/wife, Susan Cantor, train employees to repeat the order back to the customer. When mistakes happen, the staff prepares the order correctly, refunds the price and gives the customer another free item. “That way customers don’t leave here saying, ‘They screwed up my lunch,’ but ‘Holy moly, they bought my lunch plus they gave me a coupon for a free cookie.’ And that’s what they’ll tell their friends,” says Cassidy. Going to such lengths to fix problems “also hammers home to the staff how important we think it is to get the order right.”

When it comes to catered luncheons, Jackrabbit has a three-check system to ensure accuracy. The sandwich builder, the catering coordinator and the kitchen coordinator all check that the order is correct.

Likewise, Magnolias has a staff member — called an expediter — who stands at the end of the line to ensure that the order is delivered to the table quickly at the appropriate serving temperature. “The expediter is our last line of defense,” says Austin. Occasionally mistakes slip through despite a restaurant’s best efforts. If a customer receives the wrong order — or is unhappy with it for any reason — Magnolias fixes the problem quickly.

The key is to catch and fix the problems quickly, says Solomon, who recommends that servers check with their customers a minute or so after their food has been served to ensure that they are happy with it. “Too often the server serves the dinner and disappears,” he says. “You’ve got to get back to the guest in the first minute. Some people have said to me that’s too soon, but how many bites do you need to take to find out that the food is too cold? After two or three bites, you can generally tell if there’s a problem.”

A side order of civility

After 15 years in the restaurant industry, Austin knows firsthand how easy it is for something to go wrong when dining out. Out of empathy, she can overlook most glitches when she eats out. “I always appreciate it when a server is polite and handles a situation gracefully,” she says. “Regardless of small mishaps, I like to leave the restaurant having had a pleasant experience.”

Bad service comes in many forms — staff members can be rude, inattentive, overeager or too familiar. Poor customer service can start from the moment a customer calls a restaurant, says restaurant consultant Linda Lipsky, who is based in Broomall, Pennsylvania. “It’s when the host says the restaurant’s name so quickly you can’t make it out, and then instead of asking you if you can hold, says ‘hold, please.’” Also annoying is the host or hostess who can’t answer frequently asked questions, such as how to get to the restaurant. “I’ve had people tell me, ‘I don’t know how to drive here; I take the subway,’ ” recounts Lipsky. “Restaurants should keep a list of preprinted directions.”

On arriving at the restaurant, patrons’ pet peeves about service include “hosts whose only greeting is a number, like ‘Two?’ and “situations where the hostess is walking 90 miles an hour to the table and beats you there,” says Lipsky.

Once seated, Lipsky hates it when the server rushes over to take her order. “You tell them you’re not ready — and then, as if to punish you — they wait 15 minutes to come back and take your order.” Also irritating is what Lipsky refers to as the “food auction.” That’s when the server continuously asks questions like “Who gets the iced tea? Who gets the Caesar salad? Who gets the poached salmon?”

Training can solve those service glitches, says Lipsky. For example, servers should be trained to record the customer’s seat position along with his or her order. Then whoever delivers the food will readily know who gets what dish.

Teamwork can help prevent problems with inattentiveness, says Austin. “We have a buddy-check system where servers monitor their stations as well as their neighbors’. Servers watch over their section and the sections on each side of them. If a table needs to be cleared or a guest needs water, it’s taken care of.”

Just as annoying as the inattentive server is the overeager waiter or waitress who hovers over customers. “I tell people there’s a difference between mother love and smother love,” says Solomon. “When you take a sip of water and they refill your glass, that’s overkill. You want to be unobtrusive — be there, but don’t be there.”

Too much familiarity can also irk guests. “Is it my imagination, or is the service industry becoming a bit too chummy?” writes a Chicago resident in a recent letter to Ann Landers. “At a restaurant recently, a waitstaff person greeted me and my female guests with “Hi, guys.” The remainder of the meal was served with the same informality. . . . I find this informality unprofessional and somewhat offensive.” Gottlieb agrees. “I don’t think that’s nice. You shouldn’t call the women at a table ‘guys.’” Customers appreciate friendly servers, but “they don’t want them to become their best buddies,” he says.

Keep it down, please

If a restaurant is perceived as being too noisy, too dark, too crowded, too hot or too cold, customers will get annoyed — just like Julia Child.

To control the noise level at Magnolias, sound panels have been installed in the ceiling, says Austin. Located in a historic building with wooden floors and high ceilings, the restaurant can get noisy, but some customers like the “hustle and bustle” of the main dining room, she explains. For those who prefer a quieter setting, Magnolias offers a separate carpeted, candlelit dining room.

Carpets, linens and acoustical tiling can all help control the noise level, says Solomon, as can another element — the lighting. “I’ve found that the brighter the lights, the louder the restaurant. Psychologically, when you drop the light, you quiet things down,” he says. “But you’ve got to get the right balance.” If it gets too dim, people might have difficulty reading their menus and seeing their food.

Unpleasant surprises

Unexpected charges on the bill can bring an abrupt end to a wonderful dining experience. Being charged for items they never ordered or for items ordered but never received can cast a pall on the evening for diners. Guests might also be dismayed when they are charged an extra $2.50 for the sour cream that accompanied their fajitas or when they find out that the special they ordered costs $10 more than the most expensive item on the menu.

“It used to be that the blue-plate special was cheaper than the other meals. Today, the specials cost more,” says Gottlieb. Servers often list the specials’ ingredients and cooking methods, omitting the price. “A lot of customers are embarrassed to ask the price of a special,” he says. To prevent unhappy surprises come bill time, Gottlieb suggests that restaurants print a list of specials complete with prices.

Brown suggests casually pointing out extra charges to further avoid billing confusion. For example, rather than automatically serving bottled water and charging customers for it, he recommends saying something like “You’ll see at the bottom of the menu that we also offer bottled water.”

Not ready for the white-glove treatment

Whether it’s dirty restrooms, sticky tables, stained uniforms or spotty silverware, diners won’t return to restaurants they perceive as being less than clean. Customers rate facility problems — cleanliness issues, such as dirty silverware, or insect or rodent sightings — as the most severe type of service problem, according to a study published recently in the Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly. They were less likely to return to a restaurant that had facilities problems than to one that committed any of 10 other service mistakes.

To keep everything sparkling, the Jackrabbit restaurant has established a series of cleaning routines, says Cassidy. On Thursdays, staff members clean and wipe shelves; on Friday, they clean stainless-steel items; on Monday, they clean out the cooler. “If it’s not in your daily reality, it doesn’t get done,” he says.

In particular, dirty restrooms hit the “ick” button with some customers. “My mother used to say, ‘If the bathroom is dirty, then the kitchen is dirty also,’ ” says Gottlieb. During busy times, he recommends that restaurants check their restrooms every 15 minutes to remove stray pieces of paper, to clean up spills and to ensure that there’s enough toilet paper, paper towels and soap. Managers should place a ticket by the busers’ station or in the restrooms, for the person on bathroom duty to initial that he or she has done the job, he advises.

Visual, participatory training can help ingrain the importance of cleanliness, says Lipsky. She doesn’t merely tell trainees to refrain from handling glasses by their rims. Instead, she places “green goopy stuff”—available at toy stores—inside the rims. When her trainees handle the glasses by their rims they can visualize how the germs — represented by the goop — can get transferred from place to place. “It’s all about building awareness,” says Lipsky.

By becoming conscious of what annoys your customers, you can train your staff to avoid pet peeves. The result: happy customers who return repeatedly and spread positive reviews of your operation.

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Beth Panitz is an assistant editor at the National Restaurant Association.