You’re a Customer

Posted by Warren Rojas / Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

I read with great interest food blogger/videographer/author Josh Ozerky’s latest anti-restaurant rant in Time magazine.

And by “with great interest” I mean my internal bullshit detector was screaming in my ears.

Mind you, while I found myself nodding along with the few salient points–”casual” dining is by and large a misnomer, wonky reservation policies are distasteful–I was mostly stunned by how lowly Ozersky seems to regard both restaurants (his self-appointed beat) and restaurant goers (his de facto flock).

While he sprinkles sweeping generalizations (“Restaurants like cash because it allows them to cheat the IRS”) and bombast (“The most nakedly coercive form of control, of course, is the dreaded tasting menu, for which the chef sends out 11 tiny portions of food, each one carefully designed to not satisfy you, with the experience requiring less input from you than a nurse requires from an obliging spinal-trauma patient.”) throughout, he manages to shoehorn his most vitriolic views into the following paragraph:

Granted, I ‘m obliged to approach my more-frequent-than-I’d-care-to-admit outings with an eye on professional nitpicking. But something–okay, a lot of things–about Ozersky’s  gripes struck me as, at best, downright petty, and at worst, delusional and wrong.

So I decided to check with a few local dining authorities.

Chef and restaurateur Geoff Tracy seemed the most inclined to give Ozersky the benefit of the doubt.

Tracy stood firmly behind every client’s “right” to text/photograph/Tweet each meal to their heart’s content (“Sure. Why not”) and quench their thirst with thrifty alternatives (“I drink lots of cheap wine. It doesn’t suck, it just doesn’t cost that much,” he asserted). He seemed genuinely baffled by those who misguidedly game the reservation system (“I am also confounded by restaurants who say they are booked between 6 and 10…and then when you walk in the place is WIDE open. Seems like bad for business.”). He even pseudo-endorsed Ozersky’s anti-jerk clause (“Nobody likes a jerk or inconsiderate, mean people”), but left the door open for bitingly honest evaluations and oddball queries.

“Helpful and thoughtful (not mean) constructive comments actually help us get better and are appreciated,” Tracy offered, adding, “I am OK with dopey questions.”

He drew the line, however, at preemptively declining bread service (“Isn’t ‘waving him off before he even speaks’ contradicting the ‘inconsiderate’ component of Josh’s Bill of Rights?”). And Tracy found nothing redeeming about Ozersky’s call to ostracize tongue-tied restaurant workers.

” There are a lot of hardworking people in this business who are trying to learn English. People are realizing the American dream in the restaurant business every day (and in construction sites, landscaping, cleaning businesses, etc),” Tracy counseled. “Unless you are Native American, we should all keep in mind that at some point a past relative was an immigrant to this great country.”

Great American Restaurants CEO Randy Norton attempted to diffuse the whole guest vs. customer stand-off, arguing, “Airlines and grocery stores have customers. People that visit our restaurants are guests.”

“We want to treat everyone as well or better than we would guests in our homes,” Norton said. “In fact, our first core value is ‘we exist to provide happiness to our guests and staff.’ We don’t publicize this; it’s just who we are.”

Norton also rushed to the defense of his company’s long-standing, no-reservations policy.

“We don’t take reservations because it is so difficult to keep guests happy that arrive late,” he explained, suggesting that its equally difficult to gauge “how long guests will stay at a table.” GAR has, instead, utilized a call-ahead system that, while helpful–”We find most guests show up when they call so close to their arrival,” he noted–is still not flawless. “It still isn’t unusual for more than 10 percent of ‘call ahead’ guests to not show up at all,” he calculated.

Restaurateur and Back of the House columnist Meshelle Armstrong laughed off most of Ozersky’s observations, but minced no words about the proposed dining “rights.”

“He [Ozersky] needs to know, patrons do NOT have certain unalienable rights. It is not the government. A restaurant is a privately owned business–with the right to conduct business anyway it chooses,” Armstrong asserted. “IF you do choose to participate in a private business, you have to comply with their rules. SIMPLE.”

Armstrong understandably bemoaned the dissipation of civility (“Life skills and a thing called manners unfortunately HAVE gone by the wayside.”) that one might presume was the original inspiration for Ozersky’s column. But she maintains that common sense remains the best compass. “KNOW where you are going…and act appropriately,” she advised.

Armchair critic cum concierge Don Rockwell was easily the least hospitable towards Ozersky (“This guy needs to get laid”).

“The piece is a potpourri of misplaced ideas, egotism, smugness, and misanthropy with the occasional, seemingly random, grain of coherent thought. Honestly, it would have been a good April Fools’ piece because it’s right on the border of being silly enough to be dismissed as a joke; yet, it’s written for a mass audience which might actually believe some of it, so it’s a dangerous piece of writing on a very small scale,” Rockwell warned.

He went on to dissect Ozersky’s purported rights [plain text], pointing out the following [ALL CAPS]:

You Are Not a Guest

SURE YOU ARE. SECOND DEFINITION OF THE WORD RIGHT HERE.

Guests are people who come to your home.

THAT’S THE FIRST DEFINITION.

Diners at restaurants are customers.

CORRECT, AND THEY’RE ALSO GUESTS.

They pay for food and service.

CORRECT.

They therefore have certain unalienable rights,

A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF A NON SEQUITUR.

including but not limited to:

OH, SO *HE* IS THE ONE WRITING THE CONSTITUTION .

the right to take pictures of the food with their cell phones

THIS IS SO STUPID THAT I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T COMMENT ON IT.

particularly if they can do so without a flash;

OOPS! HE JUST ALIENATED ONE OF HIS UNALIENABLE RIGHTS!

the right to text all the way through the meal,

REFER TO THE RIGHT TO TAKE PICTURES OF THE FOOD WITH THEIR CELL PHONES.

whether the staff or chef likes it or not;

SERIOUSLY. THIS GUY NEEDS TO GET LAID.

the right to drink the cheapest wine on the menu or to just have iced tea;

CORRECT.

the right to take home things that they don’t finish;

I’LL GIVE HIM THIS (BUT THE RESTAURANT HAS NO OBLIGATION TO HAVE CARRYOUT CONTAINERS).

and the right to pay for their dinner with a credit card.

HOPE THIS GUY DOESN’T PLAN ON GOING TO A LOBSTER POUND.

Is there anything worse than being told,

UMMM …

at the end of a big meal,

WHY A “BIG” MEAL?

that the place doesn’t take plastic and that you have to slink to an ATM?

YEAH, CANCER IS WORSE.

Restaurants like cash because it allows them to cheat the IRS,

THIS IS PROBABLY OFTEN TRUE, BUT IT’S WRONG TO ISSUE A BLANKET STATEMENT ACCUSING ALL CASH-ONLY OPERATIONS OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR.

but that’s not your problem.

CORRECT. AND IT’S NOT HIS, EITHER (OR SHOULDN’T BE).

If a restaurant wants to pull that move, they need to tell everyone up front when they sit down.

I AGREE WITH THIS.

You’re right to hate them if they don’t.

HOW ABOUT, “YOU HAVE AN UNALIENABLE RIGHT TO HATE THEM IF THEY DON’T.” I’D GIVE HIM THAT.

And if they send a food runner who can’t speak English well to bring you your food

I ALSO THINK ENGLISH SHOULD BE THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF THE UNITED STATES OF ‘MERIKA.

and you can’t figure out what the hell he’s saying,

THEN YOU SHOULD EDUCATE YOURSELF, YOU MONOGLOT IGNORAMUS.

you have a right to have your waiter come by and do it himself or herself,

INCORRECT.

which should have happened to begin with.

WHY?

You do not, however, have the right to be a jerk,

NO, ONLY THIS GUY HAS THE RIGHT TO BE A JERK.

to be inconsiderate or to harass them with dopey questions and requests.

JUST LIKE HE’S HARASSING ME WITH THIS DOPEY COLUMN.

Just to be clear here.

SERIOUSLY. THIS GUY NEEDS TO GET LAID.

Restaurateur Michael Landrum–never one to hold his tongue or shy away from a potential media shit storm–proved to be the most stoic about Ozersky’s screed.

“I can only hope that this article will be read as the Swiftian parody that it is, with some points having a basis in reality. That being said, if one does not enjoy dining out, at all or at a specific restaurant, one should simply not do so,” Landrum said. “Every diner has the unalienable right of choice, and he should exercise it freely and without rancor.”

Meanwhile, Tracy recalled a particularly jarring occasion where he found himself on the totally wrong side of the table.

“I once was dining with Coach Bruce Boudreau at a tony restaurant in Potomac. He is a Canadian hockey player and meat-and-potato guy. He was obviously uncomfortable with the menu. The restaurant had a really nice steak on the menu which he politely asked for, but without the sauces and all the fancy stuff. The restaurant wouldn’t do it,” he noted. “Maybe we are just customers after all.”

Is Ozersky right? (222-and-counting Facebook fans can’t all have guzzled the Kool-Aid, can they?) Or is his column more about vainglorious rabble-rousing than actually elevating the dining bar?

–Warren

Tags: Chef Geoff's, code of conduct, customers, dining rights, Eat Good Food Group, etiquette, fine dining, Geoff Tracy, Great American Restaurants, guests, Gut Check, hospitality industry, Josh Ozersky, Meshelle Armstrong, Michael Landrum, Northern Virginia Magazine, NoVA, patrons, Randy Norton, Ray's the Steaks, Restaurant Eve, restaurants, servers, texting, Time Magazine, waiters, Warren Rojas