TracyFood

Friday fun! An(other) open letter to restaurant customers. 27 July 2007 11:57 am

Posted by Tracy in : advice, convenience, cooking, eating, eugene, restaurants, work , trackback

Dear restaurant customers,

I don’t hate you all, I really don’t. Without you, I wouldn’t have my job, which is a pretty cool one. But, as I wrote you once a few years ago, some of you are behave in ways that make me so angry I forget that the vast majority of you aren’t complete asses. Then, I wrote about the importance of courtesy, kindness, and freaking reading the menu. Today I am repeating two of those three very important themes, but my topic is new: understanding a restaurant’s hours of operation.

Let me get something out of the way first and foremost: food is cheap, labor isn’t. This phrase, which I like to attribute to the phenomenally badass nutritionist Marion “Food Politics” Nestle, is a short and witty way of saying that ingredients make up only a very small fraction of the cost of a restaurant meal: the rest goes to paying the people who make the meal and bring it to you and clean up afterwards, not to mention stuff like lights and air conditioning and paying the rent. Note how many, even most, of these costs are incurred even if there are no customers in the restaurant to buy food with which to generate some income towards paying all those costs. What all this means is it is almost always cheaper for a restaurant to close early rather than stay open hoping for customers to show up. Time spent closing up shop after the door is locked is money lost, period. So everybody in the house starts working to get everything all cleaned up and shut down well before the official end of the day. The ideal is to be done as soon after closing as possible — where by done I mean finished ringing up the last table’s check, not bringing their food or cooking it or taking an order or, gods forbid, still seating.

Morning Glory frequently gets last-minute rushes of hippies wanting food in the last half hour before closing. I firmly believe that there is a special hell for people who interrupt our closing rituals, and also that people like that are the reason monkeys fling their poo. If you must, come in towards the end of the day when everybody’s in the middle of these closing rituals, but beware my wrath. I am writing today, dear restaurant customers, because last Saturday we got a bunch of these last-minute jerks, who thought they were being very clever by asking for their last-minute food to go, only then they parked themselves in the outdoor seating so that Celeste couldn’t break down and lock up those tables. It was most uncool, both bogus and sad, and (in case I’m not being entirely obvious enough), it made me grumpy. Nobody likes me when I’m grumpy, least of all me.

So. With that in mind, here is a general rule of thumb for scheduling restaurant visits near closing time. Think about all the steps involved in getting a restaurant meal, from arriving until paying the check and getting out. Add up all the time for those steps, then subtract that time from the restaurant’s posted closing time. That is the very latest you’re really welcome to stop by. Last minute requests for food to take away are a little less obnoxious and rude, but only if you’re actually skipping the sitting down and eating stage of your meal (you’re still messing with the kitchen’s closing mojo, after all). Camping outside the restaurant getting in the closing staff’s way completely negates whatever small favor you may have done everyone by getting your food to go. (A related side note: getting food to go is never synonymous with getting your food rushed to you — it just gets your order into the ticket queue sooner, and maybe saved you some time that might have been spent waiting for a table.)

In eating out, as with so many things in life, waiting until the last minute is frequently more trouble than it’s worth. If you’re the last table of the day, feel free to squirm a little, especially if it looks like the floor staff is doing closing chores around you (refilling condiments, stuff like that). One more time: to figure out when you’re welcome to stop by at the end of the day, subtract the amount of time your visit will take from closing time, and maybe arrive a little before then to be on the safe side. Oh, and if you call a restaurant to ask when closing time is, and somebody tells you they’re already closing the kitchen, find another place to eat (and remember, your home kitchen is always open). Got it? Good. Thank you so much.

Love,
-Tracy

P.S. As always, tip your servers really well or be destroyed.