tisdag 30 augusti 2011
The honor of a second-class profession
The GQ food critic Alan Richman wrote an article recently about bad service. I agree with most of what he says. There is, however, one point that we mustn't forget: he's on the outside looking in. There are a million valid reasons for bad service - however, there are virtually no excuses, at least from a customers point of view. And the saying is, after all, that the customer is always right. So why is service bad? Not all waiters are doing the job because they're aspiring actors. Some of us do it because we love it, and we take pride in serving good food and good wine with good manners. These particular waiters might have a bad day - under the suit we're all human. It's an unfortunate event when that happens. But there are also other kinds of waiters - to paraphrase this article written by a proud waitress - many waiters in trendy restaurants are hired for their good looks rather than their frontal lobes. I'm not going to attempt to write again what has been well-written once: go read The Waitressing Life: The Honor of a Second-Class Profession to find out just what might have made my day (or not) today.
söndag 28 augusti 2011
That last, uncontrollable variable
Oscar Wilde once said "to get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all". I firmly believe that this is true, however, these days most people are not satisfied with only one out of three. What makes a good night of service? Read Marco Pierre White's My Story (you'll find it here) and trust me when I say that a good night for restaurant staff and for restaurant customers sometimes meet in one and the same evening, but mostly we're reading the same play in what could be parallel universes.
At Bloom, the staff are on a roll - we know our lines and how to deliver them. We try, perhaps more than other restaurants, to invite the customers over to our side (call it the dark side if you like, but we have an endless supply of both cookies and fine wines) and bring the back of the house to the front so to speak. But the customer is always the last, uncontrollable variable. Will our two universes meet? As with all the fables where the journey begins in the unknown, it requires that proverbial leap of faith.
If all you came to Bloom for was a full belly, then maybe the ends won't justify the means. You can, after all, achieve the same thing at McDonalds. If you came to Bloom for a good time, then we hope that by feeding you, amusing you and shocking you, we can put you on a spaceship to the bright and haute cuisine-landen universe where we live.
These are my Sunday musings. It's an attempt to clarify why people do come to fine dining restaurants. After all, as I've been told many times, "it's just food and wine". In our case, it's not just the destination, you see, it's the journey that matters.
At Bloom, the staff are on a roll - we know our lines and how to deliver them. We try, perhaps more than other restaurants, to invite the customers over to our side (call it the dark side if you like, but we have an endless supply of both cookies and fine wines) and bring the back of the house to the front so to speak. But the customer is always the last, uncontrollable variable. Will our two universes meet? As with all the fables where the journey begins in the unknown, it requires that proverbial leap of faith.
If all you came to Bloom for was a full belly, then maybe the ends won't justify the means. You can, after all, achieve the same thing at McDonalds. If you came to Bloom for a good time, then we hope that by feeding you, amusing you and shocking you, we can put you on a spaceship to the bright and haute cuisine-landen universe where we live.
These are my Sunday musings. It's an attempt to clarify why people do come to fine dining restaurants. After all, as I've been told many times, "it's just food and wine". In our case, it's not just the destination, you see, it's the journey that matters.
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