My old friend Melanie wrote me the other day about a dinner she’d saved up for, a Christmas present for her husband. They had a long tasting menu at a place that I have a real attachment to, and so I was glad to read words like “marvelous” and “wonderful,” glad for her to describe her favorite course as “all spheres and bubbles.”
But then: “Francis, why didn’t you tell me they were Fascists? I’m surprised that the wine steward didn’t try to dress me in appropriate underwear…the service made me feel small and powerless and somehow exposed. It was actually stressful.”
Hearing this made me sad. Sad because I wanted my friend to have as joyous a time as I did at this place, and sad because the magic the kitchen had worked was lost to the unpleasantness of her experience. Also because Fascism is an abhorrent political philosophy.
There’s an old adage in the restaurant business that good service can save bad food, but great food can never save bad service. I always thought that was stupid. There’s a story that I like to tell about my favorite Mexican restaurant. The short version is that I loved their food so much that I didn’t mind when they swindled me out of two pitchers of lemonade and literally tossed my silverware at me. I tell it because I like to believe that my focus is on food, and that if the food is good, I will happily put up with any level of griminess or gruffness. (The more I hear people slagging great mom-and-pop places for not being pretty or having professional waitstaff, the more I want to tell this story.)
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to expect good service out of fine dining. Maybe it’s because my soul is dying. Or maybe it’s because as the price increases, as expectations rise, the stakes get higher, and the effects of the service are more noticeable. A tasting-menu dinner is sort of an object lesson in that; being such a long, concentrated experience, the sum of its parts really matters. At some point, intense concentration on any one thing—food, a show, a poem—is fatiguing, and the other factors that contribute to the experience—the stiffness of the chair, an empty water glass, a server’s smarm—can creep in from the margins, infecting the center.
Of course that also means phenomenal service has the power to make an evening truly special. A friend told me once that a server had overheard her family talking about wanting to try one of the entrées, though no one ordered it. Magically, in between courses, the server came with tastes of it for everyone. I remember being lucky enough to dine at Daniel, where at some point I noticed how synchronized all the servers were as they came to the table. I noticed the subtle flourishes of gesture as they replaced silverware, took away plates. I have a habit of using the metaphor of dance when talking about restaurants, but in this case I mean it literally—it looked after a while like the staff was all dancing, and it’s no wonder that later I kept describing the restaurant as being graceful. I don’t know if these things actually make the food taste better, but they certainly make people feel cared for. They make people happy.
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