Give me a Cheese Frenchee, si vous plaît

Yesterday, I remembered another era in American history when modern technology was going to replace every waiter and waitress in America. This was before computers, so the state-of-the-art technology of the time was a telephone.

If I hadn’t spent most of the late 1970s nursing hangovers, I might have remembered that there were other restaurants in that decade that tried the novelty of having telephones on every table in order to call the kitchen — eliminating servers, with typically disastrous results, especially if alcohol was a component of the meal — or to chat up other customers. The Max & Erma’s restaurants are an example. I didn’t even know that this Denver-based restaurant chain — which did away with the table telephones in the late 1980s — was still in existence. (The closest one to Kansas City is in St. Peters, Missouri).