By Amanda Bressner
This blog is a rebuttal to Manndarko’s blog “Becoming A Regular At A Food Establishment”
As a restaurant manager, I have to say how much we appreciate our regulars. Employees love seeing familiar faces walk through the door, especially if they’re nice people and good tippers. We like knowing that our food establishment satisfies you so much you choose to spend your money there every single day, or at least multiple times a week. But mostly, we like your money in our pocket.
We don’t love our regulars unless they give us a reason to love them (see above about good tippers) and we don’t want to make small talk with you either. Especially if you’re coming in during a lunch or dinner rush. Do you see the line out the door? A completely full section? Your servers are busy! They don’t have time to hear about your trip to Lake Tahoe last weekend or the color of your dress for your cousins wedding. If you take a seat, no one is around and the server feels like getting to know you, I promise they will engage. But if you take a seat or walk up to order and see other people waiting for their sandwiches, leave the employees alone and let them take orders and make sandwiches!
Another way to know if your servers are interested in chatting is body language. If you’re talking to your server and his or her feet are facing a full 45 degrees in another direction, they have somewhere else to be! As interesting or as miserable as your day might be going, please don’t use your server/order taker as a therapist and slow down an entire business operation. Time! Is! Money!
If the same person takes your order every day and you choose to order the exact same thing, it just makes good business and hospitality sense for the person to remember your order and save you the two seconds. Because if they save you two seconds, they’re saving themselves two seconds, and can that much more seamlessly move through the line and bring in more money and tips for everyone.
Do restaurant employees like when guests know their names instead of waving a hand around and shouting “excuse me!” when their table is ready for a check? Or when a regular can walk up to a counter and say “Good afternoon, Mike, I’ll take my usual.” Of course they do, it’s polite. But they don’t want you to scream their names from across the bar when you’re in need of another drink. If you’re this kind of regular, reconsider your actions and stop doing that immediately.
Though we will always appreciate our regulars and the camaraderie sitcoms portray between them and restaurant employees could sometimes be accurate, we certainly aren’t jumping at opportunities to become your best friend. The proper etiquette for a regular is to say hi, be nice, and most importantly tip well. It all comes down to this—regular guests mean one thing: regular money.
