Have You Dined With Us Before?
How many times — and it seems like it’s increasing — does one get asked this question at a restaurant? My normal inclination is to answer honestly, as I do to most questions. But considering what the server will say if I answer in the negative, this is what I would like to say:
No, I haven’t. But let me guess what’s going to happen here. You’re just about to hand me a piece of paper, maybe even a very fancy one, that will have a list of food items and prices on it. They might even be divided up into different groups: some smaller and less expensive; some larger and more expensive. There might be a list of beverages as well.
Then I get to pick one or two of these food items from the list, tell you what they are, and in due time you (or some minion) will deliver them to my table where I will be able to eat them. I may not have dined here before but I have been to a restaurant and 99.9% of them work exactly the same way, so stop pretending that your little twist on dining out is so remarkably special. Your food may well be delicious (and I hope it is!) but it’s still coming to my table on a plate.
One is most often asked the question, it seems to me, at two places, one of which might have a more legitimate reason to ask it in the first place. Category One, without reason to ask the question, is the Alice Waters type of restaurant where all ingredients are grown locally and the menu changes regularly. Potager (which we here at DOD otherwise adore) is such a restaurant and, before they recognized us as regulars, the servers always asked us if we had been before. If we had said no they would have launched into a long (and boring) spiel about local produce. Unnecessary. It’s still food. Category Two, with a somewhat legitimate claim to ask the question, is the restaurant with unusual serving sizes: either’s it’s family style or it’s all tapas-style small plates. I try to avoid both of these kinds of restaurants but most readers will probably agree with me that neither option is so bizarre that it necessarily requires an entire explanation apart from what is usually made quite clear on the menu to begin with.
In sum, I ask restaurants — which as a genre of place in the world might well be equivalent to a secular version of the Church of DOD; in other words, we love them — to get over themselves just a little bit. You serve food. We get it.
I love your response! tee-hee! You should do it!
The only place I’ve dined where this question made any sense to me was a restaurant that used to exist near my home (sadly, now closed because the building was sold). All entrees were prices at $15, $18, or $20 with 3-4 choices in each category. The price of any entree included a choice of any appetizer or dessert on the menu so it was, in essence, a three-course prix-fixe. It would have been confusing without an explanation, since only the entrees on the menu had prices listed. The food was always good and fresh, though not exactly innovative — but it was nice to have nearby.
Yes, that does sound like one of the very few restaurants that would actually require something of an explanation. It also sounds like a good deal!
Awww… when I got the email about this post with only the title in the subject line, I was thinking you two were asking if any of your readers had waten with you before and would, subsequently, invite us all to a meal somewhere. I got very excited but… alas…
Something like that may be in the offing, Corey, once we stop all this summer traveling. Meeting like-minded Denverites was certainly one of the purposes of this blog when we started it!
My husband and I had the pleasure of eating at a very nice restaurant in Breckenridge in which we weren’t asked this just last weekend, and we were so grateful. (The waiter kind of blew it, however, when he returned to our table to ask, “how’s everything tasting?” which is probably MY number one restaurant peeve.
What am I supposed to say? “Your food sucks and I’d like to see the Chef IMMEDIATELY!” What if I have a non food-flavor complaint or request? It’s so manipulative and silly to ask how my food is “tasting.” (Is it really appropriately a gerund, anyway? Doesn’t the flavor of food always exist in the immediate present or the past tense? Can’t they at least ask how the food TASTES?)
Next time I get that, I may answer, “the food tastes fine, but this bigass cockroach under the frisee really spoiled my appetite.” In a stage voice.
While the verb tense is definitely irritating, that one does not bother me so much. If it’s bad, that is indeed the moment that you send it back: undercooked or overcooked meats, for example. People regularly send those back if they aren’t cooked to order.
Granted, most bad food is not so easily remedied and so the question is kind of moot. I feel like what they should really ask is, “Can I get you anything else right now?” or some such, because that’s pretty much the reason that they’re there anyway.