Service Call

A friend of mine, who prefers that I don’t use his name, called recently to say he had resigned his position as a waiter in one of Kansas City’s corporate-owned fine-dining restaurants after 25 years with the company. Because I don’t know many waiters who honestly consider the service profession to be a respectable career, my friend’s decision to toss his apron to the floor after wearing it for more than two decades was a big surprise to me. He’s a terrific waiter and really loved his job, but he finally reached the burnout point. The work hadn’t grown more difficult, he said; he’d lost faith in a new generation of poorly trained managers who didn’t really understand the hospitality side of the business and, even worse, had no passion for food, wine or the art of treating customers with respect.

The same week that my friend clocked out for his final shift, I received an e-mail from Paul Paz, host of Waitersworld.com, an Oregon-based site with the mission of “elevating the status of waiters in America to a professional career level.”

In his January 7 online column, Paz writes about the issues facing the hospitality industry: “We are in constant flux because of new consumer demands, products, regulations, etc.” He then quotes from a book called The Resiliency Advantage: “Employers are looking for those who can reorient themselves quickly — people who adapt to change.”

But my waiter friend here in Kansas City says he adapted to more than enough changes over a quarter-century. He had finally reached the point where he didn’t want to “reorient” himself every time a newly minted corporate manager decided to institute a new round of penny-pinching policies. “The company doesn’t even call the dining rooms restaurants anymore,” he told me. “They’re called profit centers.”

Profit centers? Now there are two words that don’t exactly conjure up images of fabulous food, candlelight and music. Is good service taking a back seat to the bottom line? Not at places such as the independently owned Piropos (see review), where a career waiter, Jeff Johnson (he previously worked at Morton’s for several years), is such a professional that he elevates the dining experience into the sublime.

I prefer dining where attentive service is still an art. When I want to visit a profit center, I’ll go to a bank.