Relaxing

and how it's easier said than done

I love restaurants. Each has its own unique culture, a system and a hierarchy of leaders. Each offers a different style of service. Each displays an aesthetic to be absorbed and appreciated (or not) as guests circulate.

 There’s a widely spread rule that the customer is always right, but this is changing. The customer, as I’ve discussed previously, is just the customer. When they enter the restaurant, they enter a carefully curated ecosystem. 

Hopefully, they relax. We want our guests to feel at ease in our care for a couple of reasons, not least of which is that it’s the staff’s job to support the guest. A well-taken-care-of guest will let you do your job. 

A happy guest also makes your job a bonafide joy. 

I recently had to reassure a man that I had things under control. He was entertaining, an understandable situation in which a person might have trouble releasing some of the reins to me, the server. He began micromanaging me as soon as I greeted the table, calling to me as I walked away, “make sure you time it out.”

I went back to him and smiled. “I assure you, I’ve got it,” I said. 

His wife nudged him, “relax.”

This is part of why I love hospitality. As annoying as guests who can’t relax can be, I have been one. I have seen my friends do it. We’ve all been there. Hopefully, we all learn to relax. 

We often have a hard time relinquishing control. Seems strange, maybe, for me to bring something as simple as dining at a restaurant to this level, but I think it’s important. Anxiety cripples a lot of people. If there were ever a stage on which the symptoms of anxiety–both individual and cultural–were displayed, that stage is restaurants. 

A reason for this is there are no set rules, only suggestions. Sure, it’s most enjoyable when guests hand the reins to the waitstaff, but do they have to? Nope. 

This is how you end up with the proverbial “Karens” we see everywhere. I try not to ascribe the name Karen with poorly behaved women. I have known lovely Karens in my lifetime, a couple of whom helped raise me. 

But I can relate to the sentiment behind the ascription. 

People who enter a restaurant expecting it to be like every other restaurant, much less their home kitchen, are the worst to wait on. 

I once encountered a woman who expected an entree she found online from a different restaurant to be the same entree she was served. I was managing at the time. I was sincerely flabbergasted. Eventually, it became clear the interaction wasn’t going anywhere, and she was asked to leave. 

Some people, like our friend in the previous paragraph, must cause chaos. They must, as “Karen culture” deems, Speak To The Manager. And the manager absorbs some real malarkey as the staff watches. No one’s day is better. 

Now, it’s important for me to say that by no means would it make a situation like the one above better to tell the woman to relax. I certainly pointed out to her that the restaurant in the picture was not our restaurant and that we unfortunately could not know the inner-workings of the other restaurant’s entree, nor was that a reasonable expectation. Of course. 

But to tell her to relax would be downright confrontational. There is a fine line between not enough and too much when it comes to speaking to difficult guests, and it’s an art, the practice of which is difficult to navigate. In fact, you don’t want to navigate it. Once I found myself in it, I certainly didn’t.

But there, in the midst of a Tuesday afternoon, you must. 

And on countless other days of the week, there again you find yourself, tethered in a strange dance to folks with whom you must spend an hour finding common ground, providing food and drink and, sometimes, unspoken things. Advice. Company. Laughter. 

The kindness of strangers is something which has fueled my career. 

The anxiety of strangers is something that has sharpened me. There is a kind of middle ground between being an a**hole and being hospitable, and this middle ground is where I learned to say “no” without saying, “no.”

Back to the story about the micromanaging man.

“I assure you that I have everything under control, sir.”

His wife nudged him, “relax.” 

It is important that restaurants establish the systems that run them. It is important that you or I, as guests, relax. 

Of course, there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. Sometimes you enter a nasty system, or a poorly run one, and in those situations you’ve got to leave, or speak to the manager, or leave a percentage of tip different than your tried and true standard. Those situations suck, and there isn’t any way around them once you’re there. 

Some systems just suck. 

But they are made up of human parts, and therefore, it is up to those humans to change them. How? 

In my experience, the way to change them is to change yourself. To grow. This takes a little while to get the hang of, because at first you might change yourself to look like someone else. But this still, small voice whispers to you as your dreams mount within the chambers of your mind, waiting.

It doesn’t just say one thing. It says a multitude of things, your mind repeating back to you those deepest jewels, dreams. As you begin to turn toward them, admiring them, becoming more and more comfortable with them, you begin to make choices that bring you closer to them, and then, suddenly, you discover more. 

Dreams everywhere. Dreams where you didn’t know there were dreams, or dreams you thought you had lost suddenly springing to life before you. 

Hopefully, along the way, whether you’re a doctor, a server, a dishwasher, a pastor, a writer, a teacher or journeyman, you learn to relax and let the systems in which you participate carry you.

Or, if you find yourself amidst one of those nasty, poorly-run systems, that you set out to change.