Service
You know in sci-fi movies where there’s an invisible force field and everything is different when you step through it? That’s how it felt to take the tiny step between the open kitchen and the dining area last week when I worked as a runner for a night. This threshold is known as the “pass” because it's where dishes get passed from the kitchen to the servers, linking BOH (back-of-house) to FOH (front-of-house). All the line cooks get scheduled for running shifts at some point, so that we can see how the food is received and what it’s like to be a server (the servers come into the kitchen sometimes too, to help prepare family meal).
The energy on the other side of this invisible wall was completely different. I was shocked by how well the frantic, concentrated mayhem was constrained to the kitchen. On the dining side, people spoke in complete sentences, like, “I can take that out of your way,” or “No, you go first,” instead of “30 SECONDS! HEARD! BEHIND!” Every now and then I jumped back into my station to help out and I felt like a serene swan gliding into a flock of flustered ducks.
I loved running the food. My restaurant is tasting-menu only and it’s pretty hard to get a reservation, which means that for most people the visit is a special occasion. There are a lot of birthdays and anniversaries and people who have traveled to the city for us. The menu has plenty of unusual things that require explanation, like the neon orange tomato leather (“like a fruit roll-up”) that wraps the tomato cake. People shushed conversations as I approached their table and I could almost always find someone who made intense eye contact as I described a dish. The owner told me that she wants to create the atmosphere of a dinner party, so I tried to bring that energy to every table I visited.
“In a restaurant, we are stranger masquerading as guest,” wrote Alicia Kennedy in an excellent piece on hospitality and hostility in the service industry. The power imbalance in the service relationship is both the engine and the fatal flaw in the whole artifice. For the many enthusiastic diners that we’re lucky to receive at my restaurant, it only takes a few rude ones to shatter the spell of warmth and generosity that we work so hard to contrive. The indoor dining mask mandate, of course, and NYC's new requirement for proof of vaccination, bring out the very worst in people. The FOH managers describe mask policing as “traumatic.” They were giving tips to servers the other day, like the importance of “smising” through the mask, raising your voice several octaves higher, and other ways to appear as non-threatening as possible when asking customers to take a small public safety measure mandated by the government. It’s impossible to play the role of host when, if you were actually hosting unreasonable guests at your home, you would simply turn them away.
My restaurant is about as good as it gets. There are various ways we’ve taken power in the customer relationship. It’s a small place that’s hard to book, we charge a lot for reservation cancellations, there’s no tipping, and because it’s a tasting menu, there are basically no choices or modifications to the food. But a restaurant is a restaurant. FOH gets frequent lectures about making guests feel cared for. All the little details, like servers checking in at each course or re-folding your napkin when you go to the bathroom, are aimed at making you feel special, like a beloved relative or like a master. They’re asked to give of themselves constantly and I can see that they do. There’s something almost spiritual about coming at strangers with a baseline of goodwill, especially in a city that makes you habitually defensive. But everything that’s gratifying about serving others in that way is an opening to be hurt by those who take their power for granted. When a guest treats a server who genuinely wants them to be happy with indifference or even aggression, it makes it that much harder to act like a human with the next guest. Yes, everyone deserves to be cared for, but does everyone deserve to pay for that care?
As I said, I enjoyed my running shift. But I know my place in the restaurant, and it’s in the back with sharp knives and spitting oil where work is clearly work and generosity is bestowed among cooks but never demanded. In the back, it’s possible to believe that what we are selling is actually the food, not the experience of luxury. I’m not confronted so much with the question of whether restaurants should exist at all. Probably not. I love to cook and I want to earn a living wage making food for people, but I wonder how we can detach that work from service as we know it. I know my problem is with much more than restaurants, with the whole idea of money as a proxy for care. But at least in my own work, I hope to find ways to serve people through cooking, with an open heart and equal footing, somehow.