“Restaurant Regulars”, A Blessing and a Curse or Don't Let the Door Hit You in the Ass

“Restaurant Regulars”,  A Blessing and a Curse or Don't Let the Door Hit You in the Ass

By Olga Watkins

We love to make you happy but we don’t always like you. We need you so we can survive in an incredibly competitive industry but we don’t want you to know that we need you. We spend hours planning menus, booking entertainment, setting up rooms and selecting food and beverage features in preparation  for your relatively brief visits. We want your time in our restaurant to be ideal for you and lucrative for us. The only thing we look forward to more than your satisfaction and delight is your timely egress.  

It was Aesop who said that familiarity breeds contempt. That truth is realized in many different scenarios as we journey through life. And often  it becomes  a sentiment in the relationships between restaurant workers and their regular customers. Repeat customers play an essential role in the success of any restaurant. Even restaurants in tourist areas have to cultivate relationships with the locals so they can fill their seats during leaner times. In a city like Pittsburgh, where each neighborhood is its own market, regular customers who visit two or more times a week can account for 75% of a restaurant or bar’s total revenue. Regardless of a restaurant’s location, some concessions must be made in an effort to please and retain its best customers. New and established customers routinely ask to make little modifications to food and beverage items; with or without cheese, on the rocks instead of straight up, with chicken instead of beef, split onto two separate plates, with vodka instead of gin and so on. In a casual dining environment these minor adjustments are expected and easily accommodated. But how do restaurants decide when they need to say no? Restaurant personnel and customers have very different perspectives and opinions about this subject. Yes, we can make you that burger with a different cheese but no, we won’t stock gluten free beer just for you.

It is second nature for restaurateurs and service staff to be people pleasers. They genuinely want to make all of their customers happy, but that is simply not possible. Restaurants have to stay focused on executing the menu items and service style that are true to their concept and doing so to the best of their ability. The idea that the customer is always right is a myth. If we operated under that premise we’d go broke quickly trying to follow every trend and entertain every whim and bad idea everyone ever had. Just think, you could be dining on deconstructed cheese curds and oyster foam on a mattress, with strangers and in total darkness. But there are some restaurants out there that try to offer something for every possible taste. And if they haven’t gone out of business, you can usually find them located at the end of interstate off ramps and in the finest mall parking lots everywhere.  

In an extremely informal survey I conducted on SurveyMonkey.com via Facebook and Twitter, I found that 100% of respondents identified themselves as “regular” customers at a casual or fine dining restaurant.  25% of those respondents felt that 4 visits to the same restaurant should establish one’s status as a regular while 45% think 6 or more visits are required. For 44% of survey takers, that equals 2-4 visits to their favorite restaurant each month. 14% visit once or twice a week and 7 % visit more than twice a week. Of the remaining respondents, 22% patronize their regular spot an average of twice a month and for 11%, it’s once a month or less. The majority of survey respondents, 37%, estimated they spend an average of $15-20 per person per visit, while 26% estimated their spending at $20-30 per person. 75% of those surveyed agreed that restaurant staff should know the names and food and drink preferences of regular customers. 63% think a complimentary food or drink for regulars is in order occasionally. And while 67% think it’s only appropriate for a regular to ask for modifications to already available food and drink items, a whopping 26% believe it’s acceptable to request items that aren’t even on the menu. 16% feel that it is appropriate for regulars to request changes to music, lighting and television channels. And 11% believe that regular customers should be seated ahead of other customers, regardless of how busy the restaurant is at the time. Only 7% of the survey respondents thought that “regular” status at a restaurant didn’t entitle them to any special services or products.

Last year the 960,000 restaurants in the U.S. generated about $604 Billion in sales. According to the US Department of Labor, the average American contributed over $5000 to that sales total.  That’s an average of 7% of each American’s total annual expenditures, roughly the same amount we each spend on “utilities, fuels and public services.” The point of sharing these statistics is simply to illustrate the important role that restaurants play in our lives. From my perspective as a restaurant employee, taking into account the amount of money that an individual customer spends in our restaurant weekly, monthly or annually makes it easier for me to understand why he or she might feel entitled to service that goes above and beyond what is customary. But understanding what motivates people doesn’t necessarily mean I’m willing to accommodate them.

Keeping regular customers happy, thanking them for their patronage and making them feel special while not surrendering the identity of a business to their flights of fancy is a precarious balance to maintain. There are still a few restaurants out there, mainly of the big chain varieties, which welcome and encourage your comments and suggestions. I am intrinsically opposed to the suggestion box. Anonymous comments and suggestions make it difficult for me to take into account the credibility of the person making suggestions or their relationship to the restaurant. I’m not generally inclined to consider special requests from a guy who comes into the restaurant once every three months, spends 10 bucks and complains incessantly because we don’t have meatball hoagies on the menu and Bud Light on tap. And I’ve seen the types of suggestions that emerge from the box. “You should have topless waitresses.” “Stay open 24 hours.” “You guys need to have a karaoke night.” “Prices are too high!! You should have a $1 value menu.”  Um…no.

There isn’t another industry that is subject to as many self proclaimed experts and self appointed critics as the restaurant and food service industry. And all by virtue of the fact that would be experts have eaten food in some restaurant somewhere and therefore understand how restaurants work and are somehow qualified to pass judgment. We each pass judgment by deciding where we spend our money. Making choices everyday as consumers doesn’t make us experts at anything but spending our own money.

In this era of food tv channels and celebrity chefs who aren’t actually chefs, we as restaurant staffers are constantly inundated with suggestions and requests regarding everything from menus to music, from all manner of people who are often without restaurant, retail or professional cooking experience. Customers learn a few buzz words like crème fraiche, caramelize and julienne and suddenly they’re James Beard. So even at the risk of offending one of my own customers I’m going to break the following news. Just because you go out to eat in restaurants, you watch Chopped and Top Chef religiously and you once cooked an entire seven course meal right out of the pages of the French Laundry cookbook does not mean that you know one damn thing about the restaurant business.  By that logic, the fact that I brush my teeth twice a day means that I know enough about dentistry to tell my dentist how to do his job.

I’m flattered that you want to share your Aunt Yetta’s plum pierogi recipe with me but I can’t offer it as a featured item despite your personal assurances that it’s incredible. I’m just too certain that I can’t sell it to anybody but you and maybe not even to you. Restaurants and bars, small businesses in general, have to stay true to their concept while allowing for a little wiggle room so adjustments can be made as they come to better understand and serve their market. So it’s not that we don’t appreciate your opinion or want to cater to your personal tastes, it’s just that we have to be aware of a bigger picture when we make decisions about what we can and can’t do or sell.

Most of us walk around believing, on some level, that it’s “all about me”. So I understand that you think you make a perfect and delicious cheesecake or pizza dough or Marsala sauce at home. That’s awesome. Please bring me some next time. But unless you’ve had to make that one item every day, multiple times a day, for several months, in an impossibly limited amount of time, each time producing an identical finished product, each time for a different person who may want you to make instant modifications to that item and knowing that with every single plate you serve you’re subject to potential review on Yelp, Urbanspoon, Twitter or any number of food blogs and Facebook pages, then you really don’t understand what’s happening behind that kitchen door. And until you’ve made that item repeatedly while you simultaneously prepare twenty other items for twenty different customers, while you yell at servers and bartenders to pick up their orders, while one of those servers has an emotional break down and starts crying because you’re mean, while you have to take ten seconds away from what you’re cooking to wrap the third degree steam burn you just suffered on your wrist, while you realize the prep cook forgot to tell you to pick up more fresh mozzarella for the night, while you notice that the dishwasher is slurring his speech and foaming at the mouth as a result of God knows what controlled substance he ingested on his way to work and while you attempt to take a call from the boss who wants an explanation as to why he just received a text from one of the regulars complaining that the cheese on their plate wasn’t sliced the same way as the last time they were there, then you can’t possibly relate to what the average restaurant chef is juggling and the decisions that he or she has to make in an instant including whether or not they are able to honor your special request. If you’ve ever wondered why Gordon Ramsey is so quick to hurl the f-bomb at people, just chew on that scenario for a few minutes and you’ll understand.

Please don’t mistake this for whining. I actually love cooking professionally. I genuinely enjoy working on the line in a busy restaurant kitchen.  Not just because I’m an egomaniacal adrenaline junkie with a constant need for approval and instant gratification, but also because I really do want you to love my food. I want the memory of something I made for you to bring a smile to your face. I want you to crave the things that you will only find in my kitchen and to bring your friends back with you so they can try them too. I want you to think of our restaurant first when you’re choosing a place to relax and enjoy your down time. I just don’t want you to ask me stupid questions and make outrageous requests of my time while you’re here relaxing. That may seem a bit harsh, but I’m just being honest. Anytime a conversation with a customer starts with “Hey! You know what you guys should do here?” I immediately retreat to the relative safety of the kitchen

Each of us chooses our favorite haunts based on varied criteria. Food and beverage quality, selection and specialties, ambience, staff personalities, kid-friendly products and services, comfortable chairs, big televisions and unique juke box compilations are all among the factors that influence our choices.  If we are physically, financially and emotionally comfortable in a restaurant and it offers just a few of the amenities we seek as consumers then our repeated patronage is likely. And I happen to believe that the average consumer doesn’t expect perfection. The place that I choose to stop for a night cap most weekends is far from perfect. They offer no late night food service or free wireless, they occasionally run out of my preferred spirit and the unavoidable presence of the big mouth, neighborhood know-it-all is all but guaranteed. But when I make my 1:00 a.m. stop there it’s because I need to decompress before I go home.  So the amenities I seek most often are provided; a salty but witty and attentive bartender who pours a generous drink, cartoons or classic movies on the televisions and an always entertaining group of fellow regulars who are just as happy to engage in friendly conversation with me as they are to pretend like I’m not there. So it’s perfect for me. I don’t expect to be handed the moon, but maybe that’s because I work in the industry. I waited three years before asking the owner of my late night hang out to stock my liquor of choice. It was then that I felt I’d proven myself as a regular and there could be no doubt that I would return often to buy that special booze I’d requested.

As far as I’m aware there has been no manual written about how to be a good customer. The reality is that some people just live their lives with a greater sense of entitlement than others. Common sense and courtesy, commodities too often in short supply, should be the guide when deciding what it is reasonable to request from a restaurant, bar or any business outside of the confines of what is typically offered. If you need to think about whether or not the request you’re about to make is unreasonable, then it probably is. Try a role reversal. What do you do for a living? How quick are you to say yes when your customers want you to do something for them that you don’t normally do? And don’t use cooking shows and competitions as a guide to what is reasonable to expect from a restaurant. Those shows are no more based in reality than Snooki’s life on the Jersey Shore. Chefs, bartenders and servers aren’t magicians. We’re just people who make a living trying to make other people happy. But we can’t entertain the whims of every customer or even begin to please all of the people all of the time. Will we serve you your favorite drink in a special glass? Yes. Will we melt your favorite cheese over your fries or give you a double order of the homemade croutons with your soup? Yes. Will we make you a sandwich from a menu that was discontinued six months ago? Maybe. Will we seat your group in front of customers who have been waiting for half an hour or keep some ground ostrich meat on hand just in case the mood strikes you? Probably not. Do tell us when you’re unhappy and we’ll try to make it right. But remember, you’re a regular here because, basically, you already love us for what we are. So embrace it, enjoy it, let us do what we do to keep you coming back for more and please, don’t let the door hit you in the ass.