How to be a great restaurant guest
Anticipating a great restaurant experience on a special night out? Start it out right by being a great guest.
A great guest is patient, lets the service flow at its best pace and allows the staff and management the opportunity to meet or exceed their expectations.
What’s a not-so-great guest? This is one who feels they are always right, moves tables and chairs around, shows up 45 minutes late for a reservation with a party of 10 instead of five, and then insists on being seated immediately. It sounds awful, but I’ve seen guests take “the customer is always right” too far. It begins to look like entitlement.
Here are other ways to be a great guest.
Let the staff move the furniture. It becomes disruptive to the restaurant when guests take chairs from other tables because many times the restaurant has reservations for those tables and they need those seats for other guests.
It could also be a liability if a customer moves furniture and then falls or hurts themselves. The bigger issue is that when guests move furniture, it can easily become a fire hazard. There are strict rules about keeping the fire exits clear for easy and safe access for guests in case of fire. Customers don’t think about these issues.
Don’t seat yourself unless you’re asked to. Empty tables, chairs or place settings are not fair game. Empty tables may be reserved for other guests, or those tables may be empty because the restaurant doesn’t have servers in that area.
It’s easy to ask servers, bussers or managers for additional place settings. The only time that I think it is all right to take place settings from another table is when you have absolutely no service because the staff is essentially ignoring your table.
Call ahead for large parties and special requests. It is that simple. Recently at a client's restaurant, they had a walk-in group of 30. We sat them at four separate tables. Had they called ahead of time, we could have put them at two large tables close together.
Calling ahead also allows the restaurant time to add extra servers to the group, get the orders in/out much faster and in the end give their guests a much better time.
Greet your server. Most servers introduce themselves when they arrive at your table, and that’s how they should be addressed. If the server says, “Good evening. My name is Thomas and I’ll be serving you tonight,” you should respect that and not call him Tom or Tommy.
The benefit of using the server’s name is that they (and you) will find the dining experience a bit more personal. Also, using the name of the server is a great way to remember them, so if you had a great experience, you can sing their praises to the manager or request them by name on your next visit.
You don’t need to introduce yourself, but … I typically share my name when I plan on looking for some additional or special service. If I am at a table of four and I want to pay the check, I may pull the server aside, introduce myself and ask them to communicate directly with me.
If I am in a larger group and I am the host, I definitely want to introduce myself to the server and let them know what I am looking for in terms of the overall experience that I would like my guests to enjoy.
A famous restaurateur once said, “The customer may not always be right, but they will always be the customer.” This means that even if the guest is wrong, a good restaurant trains their staff to handle sticky situations and do what they can to accommodate the guest.
As guests, though, we need to help the restaurant staff understand our expectations and live up to our end of the bargain by communicating, being on time and keeping our requests reasonable.
• Izzy Kharasch is the founder of Hospitality Works, a consulting firm that has worked with 700+ restaurants and small businesses nationwide. He is offering Daily Herald restaurant owners a free consultation by contacting him at Izzy@HospitalityWorks.com.