Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (27 page)

• On a comped or discounted meal or drink

Tip on what it would have cost at the regular price. (I suggest maybe sharing your good fortune at getting a freebie by leaving a little more than you would otherwise.)

• Baristas

“A lot of work goes into making these caffeinated chemistry experiments,” Dublanica notes. He thinks people should treat the barista more like the bartender when it comes time to pay. “You drive up to Starbucks and you order 72,000 calories of coffee and it costs you $37 and then you go ‘Bye’ and you don’t leave them anything. You’re a jerk.” He says that people who work at coffee bars don’t expect to be tipped, but what he heard from people who work at Starbucks is that the change on a cup of coffee—say, 27 cents—is appreciated. That’s how Dublanica tips on a cup of coffee. “Whatever is left over [in change], I give to them. If it comes out to $1.97 … I’ll look for [more] change.”

• Adult entertainment

I asked Dublanica what strippers should get. “Anywhere from a dollar to a Mercedes-Benz … where do we start? If you’re sitting at the rail and she shakes it a little, give her a dollar. A tip on a lap dance should be 20 percent.”

LORD OF THE FRIES: HOW TO KEEP DINING FROM GOING DYSTOPIAN

It’s unlikely that during dinner, somebody’s going to off somebody with a boulder, like one of the boys did to poor Piggy in William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, but the following guidelines should help you manage the uncivilized behavior you encounter (or may be tempted to engage in) while dining at a restaurant or as a guest at a dinner party.

Too gross for comfort: Which behaviors are okay at the table, and which belong in the bathroom?

One etiquette auntie will claim that a woman may apply lipstick at the table if she’s quick about it; another will sniff (à la the
Downton Abbey
dowager countess),“The dinner table is not to be used as a vanity, my dear.”

Although there seems to be solid agreement from the aunties on “no flossing while dining,” the standards for hygiene and grooming behaviors largely seem a matter of she said versus she said—as in, arbitrary and mainly dependent on whether you bought a book by this etiquette auntie or that one.

I suggest we instead go by an age-old standard: the evolved human emotion of disgust. Evolutionary psychologists Joshua M. Tybur and Debra Lieberman point out, in their paper “Microbes, Mating, and Morality,” that disgust seems to have evolved to help us avoid disease-causing microorganisms, a threat to human survival and reproduction. Disgust acts as a psychological “Keep Out!” sign when we encounter things and substances that can infect us, like poo, bodily fluids, spoiled foods, insects and rodents, and dead and decomposing bodies.
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Decomposing bodies probably aren’t a big issue for you when you dine out. But, consider how pathogens are spread from person to person. If whatever behavior you’re contemplating could cause some bit of something—a piece of chewed food or some bodily icky—to go airborne, it’s bathroom behavior. So, since applying your lipstick will not cause any to land on another person or their food, you can do it at the table. Nose-blowing, teeth-picking, ear-digging, nail-clipping (yes, disturbingly, it is necessary to include this), eyebrow-plucking, applying powder or false eyelashes, or removing your fake eyeball, sadly, requires a bathroom visit.

When food meets its maker: Guidelines on sending food back.

I used to have a policy of not sending food back in a restaurant unless there was something six-legged using it as a jogging track. Sending food back felt princessy, and I was afraid of seeming like the sort of woman who orders a Diet Coke with
exactly
three ice cubes.

Well, I like my beef “very rare” (as in, “faintly mooing”) and ordered a cheeseburger that way at a nice restaurant I frequent. Uncharacteristic of this place, it instead came to me very well-done—as in, partially cremated.

I signaled to our waiter, a sweet guy who’s been working there for years. Pointing to the hardened puck on my plate, I said, “I don’t want to be one of those picky-wicky customers who sends food back, but this is seriously well-done…”

“You’re absolutely right to send it back if it’s not the way you asked for it,” he said. “You’re paying for your meal. You should get what you ordered.”

And he’s right.

If you’re unhappy that your food is substantially different from what you ordered and if you can’t easily correct the problem yourself (say, by extricating a few croutons from your salad), it’s fair, not fussy, to return it to the kitchen. Other examples of food you’re right to repatriate include chicken that’s rare or undercooked inside (or any food that’s unhealthy to eat), food that includes some allergen that you specifically asked them to leave out, and food that’s supposed to be hot that arrives cold.

If you know good food and you know what you’ve been served doesn’t qualify, it’s okay to do as a foodie friend of mine has on occasion—say to the waiter, “You know, this is just not good. Can you do anything for me here?” My friend told me, “It has always worked out with them saying, ‘I’m sorry you don’t like this. What can I get you?’ The tip goes to 30 percent immediately.”

If, however, the mistake is yours—like if you took a gamble on some exotic food or didn’t really pay sufficient attention when ordering—you should, as they say, eat your mistake (or order another item, with the expectation that you’ll pay for it).

As for rumors that sending food back will cause the kitchen staff to spit or pee in it, that is possible, but per all the waiters I talked to and their blog comments I read, it happens rarely to never. Again, keep in mind that the kitchen staff is less likely to long for revenge on a customer the waiter portrays as nice, polite, and trying to be reasonable.

They’re called “reservations,” not “possibilities.”

Sometimes when a person with a dinner reservation can’t make it and doesn’t let the restaurant know, they have a very good reason, like that they’re in a coma or dead. Others simply can’t be bothered to pull out their phone and take twenty seconds to do the right thing.

This means that nice restaurants in urban areas can have between five and twenty-five no-shows at reserved tables a night. For a small restaurant or one operating on a tight margin, even two no-shows can mean they’re operating in the red. Yes, sometimes a reservation must be canceled, but it’s considerate to do it as much in advance as possible because many restaurants will hold a reserved table for between fifteen and thirty minutes, honoring their end of the commitment and losing money in the process.

If you are planning on showing but are running late, call the restaurant and apologize and let them know (realistically) when you think you
can
get there. If doing the right thing isn’t motivation enough, keep in mind that many restaurants have computer systems that track everything from reservations to a customer’s allergies and favorite waiters. If you are a poor tipper, have no-showed for your reservations, or have made an annoyance of yourself, they’ve got your number, and there’s a good chance they won’t put it beside a reservation there again.

That wouldn’t exactly be a huge deal for anyone who doesn’t live in a fifty-person, one-restaurant town. But offenders should consider the possibility that they’ll cross paths with a restaurateur fed up enough to engage in a little customer-shaming. Noah Ellis, owner and general manager of the Los Angeles restaurant Red Medicine, Twitter-shamed one night’s no-shows by name, leading off with, “All the nice guests who wonder why restaurants overbook and they sometimes have to wait for their res[ervation] should thank people like those below.”
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A classier and more amusing form of punishment comes from New York City chef and restaurateur Dewey Dufresne, who nails the no-shows while sounding like he’s giving them the benefit of the doubt. His restaurateur son, Wylie Dufresne, told Eater National’s Amy McKeever that his dad “has been known to call people late at night who haven’t shown up hours after their reservation—and well after they closed—and say, ‘Hey, we’re still holding a table for you. Should we let it go?’”

Sweet dreams, rude people!

“Waiters” should describe restaurant staffers, not customers with reservations.

If you have a reservation, “fifteen minutes is about the tops you should be asked to wait,” advises Nick Coe, a Los Angeles–based chef who has also owned restaurants. This assumes that your entire party has arrived, which he says is legitimate for a restaurant to ask, lest diners sit down and play table hockey for an hour while waiting for somebody to arrive and only then place their orders.

But if you’re all there and you’re kept waiting an hour at the bar, Coe says something has gone very wrong and you need to speak to the manager. He “ought to comp you on something—anything from a bottle of wine to your whole dinner.” If something “fairly substantial” weren’t offered, Coe says he would walk out. “I wouldn’t want to give a restaurant like that my money. They’ve been totally unprofessional.”

Coe acknowledged that a smaller restaurant without many tables can have a harder time making space for those with reservations when there are “campers,” people hanging out long after they’ve paid. Still, he says, “it’s really not an excuse to say, ‘People are sitting there and won’t get up.’” A professional manager has tricks to make that happen, for example, saying, “We’d love to have you stay, but there’s somebody booked for this table right now, so why don’t you have a drink at the bar on us?”

There will be times when you’ll realize that it’s simply a better bet to keep waiting than to leave, like on a Saturday night when you’re unlikely to get a table at any restaurant where the maître d’ isn’t a redheaded molded plastic clown. Your impulse afterward will probably be to go tar and feather them on Yelp. But Coe suggests giving them a chance to fix their mistake: writing them a letter, letting them know what happened (since it’s possible that, say, the regular manager was out the night you were dining and your experience wasn’t business as usual). If you aren’t a letter writer, you could call and ask to speak to the manager. Coe says, “A good restaurant will offer you some inducement to come back and give them another chance.”

Fine-dining atmosphere-eaters: Underparented children, glowing screens, ringing phones, flash photos, shower shoes, and adult bigmouths.

People dining in fine restaurants could just as well get gourmet carryout and eat it at the wild monkey den at the zoo or at the New York Stock Exchange at the opening bell. But few people go to fine restaurants just for the food. The atmosphere is an essential part of the experience, with the dimmed lights, elegant floral arrangements, and waiters speaking in hushed tones instead of hollering across the place, diner-style, “Yo, put a rush on that partridge confit!” This means it’s absolutely unfair for any restaurant patron to force a transformation of this environment on the other patrons with any of the following creatures or items:

• Underparented children

Legend has it that there are young children in this country who can be counted on to behave as if they were merely short adults. If this describes your toddler, there seems to be no good argument for barring him or her from fine dining. If, however, your wee treasure is at all likely to fidget, flail, howl, run up and down the restaurant aisles, chirp her favorite word twenty-five times in a row, and unscrew the salt shakers and spread tiny dunes across the table, she and those dining around you will be much happier if you leave her at home for a fun night of “Let’s Try to Institutionalize Another Babysitter!”

• Underparented adults

Mommy’s admonition—“use your inside voice”—also applies when you are fifty-one. Unless you are giving out winning stock tips, nobody wants to hear you at the next table.

• Hairy man-toe revealing footgear

Flip-flops are also known as “shower shoes,” not “fine French restaurant shoes.” Gentlemen, nobody wants to see your hairy toe knuckles while dining.
⁵⁰

• Glowing screens

In a dimly lit restaurant, brightly lit phone screens, iPads, and laptop screens are eye grabbers, stealing people’s attention away from their companions and dinner. Should you be tempted to send, oh, “maybe just twenty-six or thirty e-mails,” consider that there’s probably a reason restaurants advertise “fine dining” instead of “fine data entry.”

• Flash photos of food or friends

If you can’t take your photo without a flash and without getting into the lap of the people dining next to you (for a better angle on your sister or your salmon), you should satisfy yourself with memorializing your evening in your mind alone. If restaurants thought blinding flashes of light would enhance the dining experience, they’d hire someone to make them. (Got epilepsy? Come to Joe’s Bistro, and we’ll see if we can’t trigger a seizure.)

• Answering phones or texting during dinner

If you are Cary Grant and it’s 1940 and you’re saying a few words on the house phone that the tuxedoed maître d’ brought over to your restaurant table, you look pretty smooth because, well, wow—getting a telephone call while dining. These days, however, if you’re on your cell phone in a restaurant, you just look like all the other people yammering into theirs while shoving fries into their piehole at Mickey D’s.

Letting your cell phone ring in a restaurant (or another shared space that is not a loud foundry) is completely rude. It also seems ill-advised to annoy other patrons around you who not only have been drinking but may just have been given sharpened steak knives. Assuming you aren’t the government official with your finger on the “Nuke North Korea” button, your cell phone should be turned off and stowed away while dining. Merely putting it on vibrate will likely tempt you to make it—and not your dining companion—the center of attention every time it buzzes. This is a lovely way to tell the person with you that they are too dull and unimportant to command your attention.