Thoughts on the Meaning of Restaurants

Should we really expect to be "waited on"?

I’ve written about restaurants from time to time here, and I’m working on a longer piece about the purpose of restaurants in light of the pandemic, and the tension between restaurants as very challenging businesses (for operators), versus places to relax and be served (for customers.)

In one of these conversations, a fellow mentioned his son, who took a part-time job as a waiter at some point in high school. He worked hard and attended to his tables better than anyone, and made a killing in tips. Every waiter and waitress should be like that, right?

I guess maybe there’s a little bit of a socialist in me, which is not something I would have thought when I did my first in-person office internship, back in grad school. The place was unionized, and they required employees to take an hour for lunch. They didn’t exactly enforce it, but the idea was that you were supposed to work a certain number of hours and not more. Back then I thought that was silly. Why throttle the hardest workers? To make the lazy workers feel better about themselves? I couldn’t really think of any other reason.

But now I understand the deeper logic. Nobody will really get a lunch hour at all if it isn’t encouraged/required. It’s a way of limiting how much competition will be allowed to erode quality of life. Look at Silicon Valley, where people drink Soylent in order to monetize their lunch hour. Look at the erosion of all the little perks of office life. Maybe permitting people to work too hard is a kind of unfreedom, because it becomes the only option, yet it only works for some people. Maybe real freedom is having a place to be average, mediocre, and good enough.

So when I hear of a waiter hustling and working extra hard for tips, there’s something about it that almost bothers me. Why should one superhuman be allowed to ruin it for everyone else? Why should the intense, borderline workaholic mindset make the vast majority of ordinary workers look like slackers? How can we prevent business from operating according to the expectation of the superhuman workers unless we limit their right to work abnormally hard? Making sure there’s room for ordinary people, shielding them from too much efficiency, is one of the purposes of public policy. That’s what unions do. It’s what protectionism does. It’s not efficient, but that’s the point.

Now, do I really mean this? Should that hustling waiter get a reprimand from his boss? Of course not. I mean this all more conceptually, in the sense that we should admire work ethic without allowing a minority of the hardest workers—and more importantly, managers—to set the tone and expectations. Staying on topic with restaurants, I wrote about this back in 2020, when tens of thousands of restaurants permanently or temporarily closed:

It is possible for the customer—or the British celebrity chef—to simply expect too much, and there is probably a point at which the expected standard no longer realistically matches the abilities of the average restaurateur. If standards have climbed so high that restaurants are increasingly not viable as ordinary family businesses, then something has been lost….

In a 2019 interview with Hot Ones, a popular online food show, Gordon Ramsay addressed “all the snowflakes and Millennials out there: the more you get pushed, the thicker your skin, and the thicker your skin, trust me, the higher you go.” Grit, determination, and success certainly describe Ramsay’s own professional arc. But one wonders how high the families from innumerable episodes of Kitchen Nightmares have gone, put through the wringer of bankruptcy and foreclosure and divorce and deferred childbearing and untold emotional pain for the crime of serving frozen pizza, or even for the “crime” of doing business in an unforeseen recession.

I still think that. What do you think?

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Related Reading:

Thoughts on Restaurants and “Service”

“Give Me a House,” Says Almost No One

Getting Good at Doing Things Wrong

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