“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.
