What does it mean to provide good service? The definition can change depending on the situation; you don’t go into a meal at Puck N’ Wings with the same expectations you might have for an evening at a Mark McEwan restaurant. Increasingly, though, the typical relationship between customer and establishment, in which meeting the needs of the former is the core of a good business strategy for the latter, is being challenged. These days, it’s becoming trendy for restaurants to tell patrons how it is, and even to purport to school them in certain culinary matters. In this model, it is the expert, as represented by the business, that is always right, and the responsibility of customers to recognize their good fortune at being able to dine someplace sophisticated enough to demand respect.
In Toronto, the most notorious example of this is the Italian restaurant chain, Terroni, which is infamous among food lovers for taking a hard line on condiments, substitutions, and so on. At Terroni, if I want Parmesan cheese on my pasta but the combo doesn’t meet the restaurant’s standards of authenticity, my server will outright refuse me the cheese. The reasoning for their stance is outlined on the restaurant’s website, which states: “There’s a great satisfaction in preparing something that’s been prepared the same way for a hundred years. We respect tradition and work hard to prepare our food as authentically as we can.” (Apparently they don’t like substitutions in matters of vocabulary, either.) In other words, this is the way they do it in Southern Italy, and if you don’t like it, try Pizza Pizza.
Variations on the theme can be found throughout the city. At Pizzeria Libretto, a much-lauded joint on the bustling Ossington strip, it’s a point of pride to be the only place in town that has been certified by the Vera Pizza Napoletana, a.k.a. the pizza police. Libretto’s website (which actually has an “Ideology” section) echoes Terroni’s:
“Libretto aims to be loyal to what real pizza is, invented in Naples using local natural ingredients, cooked in a wood fired oven at extremely high heat to achieve a charred, blistered crust…Pizzeria Libretto makes the only certified Vera Pizza Napoletana in Toronto, using the guidelines set out by the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association and as set out by the Italian Government and the European Union. This strong statement is backed by our commitment to specifically selected high quality ingredients, made in a traditional manner with old world equipment.”
Again, the gist is clear: the average guest obviously doesn’t know what real pizza is, so we’re telling them, and they should be thankful to us for operating at such an exacting standard.
It’s not just pizza joints. A recent article in the Globe and Mail profiled a new collective of independent coffee shops that call themselves the Toronto Coffee Conspiracy. According to the article, the TCC is “a united group of like-minded ‘third wave’ independent cafés hoping to spread and promote café culture throughout the city.” It quotes Alex Tran, co-owner of the coffee shop Blondie’s, as saying that “One of the goals of the TCC is to show people the difference in quality between our shops and something like Starbucks.” I’m no fan of Starbucks’ coffee, but the statement comes off as a somewhat arrogant in its implication that the vast majority of coffee drinkers aren’t smart enough to know what real, authentic coffee should taste like.
There are positive sides to this. It’s not difficult to see the approach as a welcome antidote to the kind of decadent self-indulgence that has fueled North American consumer culture in the past decades — a reproach to the idea that we should always have it our way, right away, in as large a quantity as possible. And using fresh ingredients, knowing where your food comes from, and learning to appreciate the traditions behind it are all good things.
However, the we-know-better attitude overlooks one of the fundamental truths of the hospitality industry: the restaurant is playing the role of host, the patron of guest, and a gracious and generous host is always better than a resentful or pedantic one. I like to be educated about my food by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate, but dinner is not best served over lectures. Imagine, for a moment, eating a meal in someone’s home, asking them to pass the salt, and being told that you’re not allowed because salt will spoil the purity of the dish. You probably leave that person’s home thinking they’re a bit of an asshole, regardless of how good the food was.
I recently went out for dinner at one of my favourite restaurants, Mount Everest, which, in my estimation, serves Toronto’s best Indian food. My wife and I have been going there since it opened, so we have a good relationship with the owners to begin with, but the quality of service during our recent visit still impressed me: when the staff learned it was my birthday, they not only proffered a complimentary dessert, but also gave me a gift voucher for my next meal. That may be an exceptional move on their part. But they were just as gracious before they knew it was a special occasion: upon ordering, when I asked how hot the vindaloo was, the server responded, “How do you like it?” “Spicy, but not spicy enough that I can’t taste it,” I told him. “Perfect,” he said. It may not have been prepared to exactly according to the recipe passed down from the proprietor’s grandmother, or inscribed in whatever holy book sets out the rules for a good curry, but it was what I wanted, and the way the server made me feel like a valuable equal in the dining experience left me feeling much more content than I would have had I learned the precise level to which a vindaloo should be spiced — but been unable to eat it because it threatened to dissolve my stomach lining.
The practice of leaving things to the chef has a legitimate history, especially in Japanese cuisine, where the concept of omakase dining allows diners to cede complete control of the meal to an expert chef. (The word means something akin to “entrust.”) But while a top tier sushi chef like Kaji will craft each omakase menu according to the season, the best available fish, and other variable factors, making for a unique experience each time and presenting the meal in the manner of a complete artwork, the menu at places like Terroni doesn’t change that often: my spaghetti Bolognese is going to be the more or less the same every time, so their refusal to give me hot sauce for it seems less like a carefully calibrated move to maintain the integrity or continuity of the meal, and more like simple snobbery. Dining-as-education has its benefits, but when it comes to good service, authenticity shouldn’t come at the cost of that contented feeling you get when you leave a restaurant feeling as though you’ve left the house of a good friend.
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