Walk into any restaurant in America and you will generally find exactly the same thing. If you are lucky, there will not be a group of people standing and sitting in a small area near the front, watching the hostess with eager eyes that their table is ready. Instead, you will walk in to be greeted by a smiling woman or man who asks how many are in your party, perhaps grabs some menus or some wrapped silverware, and guides you through rows of tables and booths to a place that will be designated as yours for the next 30 minutes to an hour or however long you plan to engage in the act of dining out. What you may not realize is that the wait staff is already sizing you up, deciding for themselves what kind of restaurant customer you might be. If you’re like most people, you probably fall into one of four major categories, only one of which the wait staff welcomes with a real smile: the big family, the royals, the darlings, or the Important People. It’s relatively easy to classify these various different groups and it may surprise you to learn which one you belong in.
It’s relatively easy to determine whether you belong in the big family group, a categorization that we all might fall into at one time or another. The big family customer does not necessarily belong to a big family. Instead, this is a person who is part of a much larger group. More than one table has to be put together to accommodate the crowd. As Rebecca Scheonkopf describes them, they are “loud and awful, and the teenage daughter sends her entree back not because it wasn’t right but because she didn’t like it, and the teenage boy sits silent and looks like a serial killer, and the baby shrieks, and the toddler stands on the banquette and stares at the customers at the next table” (2011). This type of customer always leaves a huge mess behind, stays at the restaurant too long taking up space, and is usually too loud as they try to talk to each other from one end of the table to the other. They require a lot of extra help for drink refills and extra napkins, but they usually leave an okay tip.
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By contrast, the Royals are perhaps the most difficult type of customer for the wait staff. For these people, there is always something wrong. The choices on the menu aren’t varied enough, unless they are too varied. The menus are sticky or the table wasn’t clean enough. The silverware is cheap aluminum or the condiment tray is missing, not complete, not fully stocked, in the way. Throughout the meal, they find reasons to complain, send food and drinks back, become irritated that the wait staff is not attentive enough, is too attentive. In most cases, these people seem to have a sour egg permanently stuck near the roof of their mouth. They seem to take a perverse pleasure in making sure everyone around them knows they are in charge. There has been some guessing that they act this way as a means of making themselves feel more important. However, as Jamie Frater points out, “don’t treat the servers badly. It makes you look common” (2007). Since they can never be happy with their service, they almost never leave a decent tip.
The Important People are almost as bad as the royals. They don’t look for ways to criticize, but their behavior can be just as demeaning and frustrating. These people are so full of business that they can’t take the time to stop and exchange a pleasantry or two. They make their orders as a breath between business statements to their dining partner, not looking at the server and shoving the menu in the server’s general direction. They don’t want to be bothered with questions of whether everything is okay – they would have said something if anything was wrong. What they want of their wait staff is someone who fulfills their needs with as little effort on their part as possible and otherwise stays out of the way. The only benefit of these customers is they usually get out of the way quickly and can generally be counted on to leave a fair tip.
What makes life bearable in the restaurant setting among these various types of customers is the last customer type, the Darlings. These customers must have been wait staff at some point in their past as they seem to understand some of what the server is going through. They are courteous and polite, apologize when they cause any problems and are happy to talk with servers in between tables. They may or may not tip well, but they almost always leave their tables cleaned and dishes stacked ready for easy clean up.
Understanding these various different customer types may shed some light on the type of restaurant customer you tend to be. If you find that you always seem to get poor treatment in restaurants, it may be helpful to go through these types and see if you’re giving off any signals that would place you in one of the lesser desired categories of customers. A few minor changes in how you approach your next restaurant visit might change your dining out experience forever.
- Frater, Jamie. (Aug. 14, 2007). “Top 10 Rules for Fine Dining.” ListVerse. http://listverse.com/2007/08/14/top-10-rules-for-fine-dining/
- Schoenkopf, Rebecca. (Nov. 28, 2011). “Common Issues and Your Ideas.” Western New York Local Food Service. http://westernnewyork.localfoodservice.com/
