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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Bad Service: Is it the Server Or the Kitchen?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
IS YOUR DINNER LATE because of the line cook?
Photo: Jenni Girtman/AJC staff
Restaurant diners are always so quick to blame the server whenever anything goes wrong during the dining experience. But sometimes things go wrong elsewhere in the restaurant and the result has a rippling effect — your dinner may be late to the table because the kitchen is slow. Your server may be having a hard time keeping up with drink orders because he/she was just triple sat by the hostess.
Truthfully, a well-run restaurant is a well-oiled machine, and when there’s a breakdown, it often affects the customer. Funny thing is, as the diner, you can usually tell where the problem is.
I ate at a Epcot-esque Italian restaurant inside Sandestin resort over the weekend (definitely not my bag, but it was late and the kids were hungry, AND it was pasta — a triple threat).
From the time our waiter took our order to the time we actually ate an hour went by. The waiter kept apologizing, blaming it on the kitchen, and we kept eating bread. It took him almost 30 minutes to bring salads, though. Looking around, no one else had their food, either. And he even admitted to sending our calamari to another table by accident.
The lack of food on other tables is a sign that the kitchen is slow, especially when there’s not a sense of frenzy to the atmosphere. But our server should have helped with the salads to get them to the table faster, and he should make friends with the fry cooks to get some pull when he screws up and sends an order out to the wrong table.
What clues tell YOU where bad service is coming from?
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