Customer disservice: are NYC restaurants slipping?

Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 9, 1996 by Milford Prewitt

Ever hear this one?

A guy orders Prime rib at a restaurant and its seems to take a long time to prepare. Finally, the server comes out of the kitchen with the order, but he is pressing his finger into the meat.

"Why is your finger on my food?" the guest asks in a controlled rage.

"Oh, I didn't want it to fall off the plate again," the server replies.

I'll bet a New York restaurant patron made up that joke and chances are that he made it up in the past year or so. I fear that the joke is reflective of a disturbing erosion in the quality of customer service here.

This is hardly a blanket condemnation. I know that most operators in the city assign a very high premium to serving their guests. Indeed, I can name a few places in town where patrons are likely to return not so much because the food is so outstanding as because the staff makes them feel as if they own the joint.

But then there's the 1997 Zagat Restaurant Guide and some notes I collected from friends and might be on the wane.

Zagat which measures food service and decor on a 0-to-30 numerical scale, reported, service and decor on year in a row, the average service score was about 16.7 in New York, while food was higher at 18.5.

"You should see some of the letters we get," says Allan Ripp, Zagat publicist. "People are complaining."

My immediate reaction to all of this is that maybe some restaurateurs have taken the industry's past few boom years here for granted. New York's foodservice industry has been riding high along withe the city's recovery as a destination center. Hotels are running 90-plus-percent occupancy rates, new restaurants continues to open and some have reservations books that are filled until next year.

With such demand and no sign that it's softening maybe some restaurants have come to believe that there's always another guest. So what if service suffers a little?

Here's an example of what I mean.

At a new East Village restaurant, a waiter brought me the night's special crabmeat cakes, instead of the free-range roasted chicken I ordered from the permanent menu. I have a horrendous allergy to shellfish and would never have ordered that meal for myself.

Here why would I put this in if you didn't order it?" the waiter said, pointing to the unreadable chicken scratch on his pad. "I can hear."

Indeed? Why would I order it for myself if I can't eat it?

Here's more:

* At a popular Lincoln Center area restaurant that also is a branch of struggling national chain, a colleague's mentally challenged friend - who was dining with her parents - were treated shabbily once the wait staff picked up on her mental retardation. Noticing that she was wearing tennis shoes, the staff said there was a dress code that precluded sneakers even though there were others customers in even more casual states of dress

* Looking for a late-night snack in Times Square my colleague Mark Hamstra sat at the counter of a virtually empty national chain restaurant for 10 minutes unattended. Fed up, he had to walk to find the manager to ask for a waiter. The manager said OK. But instead of delivering a server the manager went directly to a booth to resume a conversation with a friend. Hamstra left unserved.

* My associate at work, Amy Zuber vows she is never returning to a hot new restaurant on the Upper East Side - the newest venture from a prominent local restaurant group It seems as the restaurant's hip patrons might say that a waiter "copped a major attitude" when Zuber pointed out that the entrees were delivered before the appetizers. "Oh, do you still want them?" the server asked in a snit. "Do you always have appetizers?" Although the waiter later admitted that he never wrote down the appetizer request, that didn't stop him from acting annoyed and ill-tempered toward Zuber's party the rest of the night.

Let's hope those are cautionary tales and not symptoms of a broader pathology. Remember that old saying: A person has a good time at a restaurant and at most might tell one other person about it. But if he has a bad time, he'll tell 10 people before the week is out.