#restaurant-service

#restaurant-service

Picture this: a couple walks into a restaurant on a Friday night. They glance around, choose their table, and settle into their seats. Before they've even opened their menus, their server already has a pretty good idea whether they'll leave 10% or 25%. It sounds like mind reading, but after talking with dozens of servers over the years, I've learned it's more like pattern recognition honed by thousands of interactions.

New Year's Eve has always struck me as the most treacherous of nights. Not because of the drink, or the fireworks, or the pressure of staying awake past midnight (although that alone should qualify as an endurance sport). Like Valentine's Day and your birthday, what makes New Year's Eve perilous is the collective insistence that this night has to deliver: the best meal, the best party, the best version of ourselves.

Within hours of opening, the wheels started coming off the wagon. The kitchen couldn't handle the volume of hundreds of guests being seated all at once. Aggrieved parties stormed out in the middle of their meals after waiting 45 minutes in between courses. Babies cried. Managers were summoned. Most guests left feeling cheated - like we'd ruined their holiday. I suspect that none of them realized (or cared), but they had also ruined mine.

While I appreciate it greatly, there's one thing that I appreciate more. If you're in a booth by the wall, please move your dishes closer to the edge of the table by the walkway. It's so much easier for a server to pick up the dishes as they walk past than if they have to climb onto the bench to gather a pile of dishes.

Tillingham is essentially a natural biodynamic wine production business working over 70 acres of gently rolling countryside, near Rye and the Romney Marshes in East Sussex. If only their main trouble was making bottles of chardonnay and pinot blanc, or selling pretty Tillingham tea towels at 36 a pop. But no, Tillingham has (quite literally) many other plates to juggle: it has a fancy restaurant and a vast barn from which they serve pizza, too.