All The Restaurant's A Stage

Pots and pans made it out of restaurant kitchens years ago, but they now share a spot with meaningless, gimmicky contraptions American restaurateurs somehow figure belong at the table. Waiters come at customers with steamers, chopping blocks, hibachis, and heat lamps without considering the fact that much of the equipment is actually unsafe. For certain, none of it adds any authenticity to the food. The Dutch oven the waiter sets down could easily contain a glorified TV dinner, and all too often does. The unnecessary dining baggage combined with servers' unchecked use of dangerous chemicals and obsessive enforcement of table status checks in the name of "service" are destroying the American dining experience.

Most of the pieces of trendy tableware are props in an endless ping-pong match of pointless performances between competing restaurants, each one trying to outdo the other with a flashier stunt. When a customer asks for black pepper, someone behind them starts dancing with a ridiculous oversized grinder better suited to a Soviet missile silo. Acts like this one have been in the dining canon for decades, but proprietors never stop perfecting others. Someone orders fried potatoes; the staff lowers them down in a metal bucket. Four pallbearers bring in the paella in a hollowed out log. French onion soup appears in a chalice. Even the Coast Guard must be involved because a lot of fare now sails by on a boat.

Exotic tableware turns heads, but will do so only once. The second time a customer sees a butter churn in front of them they will wish the waiter had left it in the barn. Eating out should not be a test. Nobody knows what a rolling pin is doing at the table––and they don't care. They're hungry. Forcing customers to unlock their dinner with a trick lever or juggle some sizzling cast iron apparatus will only have them wondering who is doing the serving.

Cooking equipment does not improve food quality, nor does it inspire customers. All of it just makes the dinner table look like a minefield. Bad stew in a crock is still bad stew no matter how rustic it looks. Eating a steak on a hot stone with a fire poker doesn't make anyone a cowboy. Lazy Susans don't give the food character; they give it vertigo. Fish on a wood plank is ridiculous, but if the plank is the one with more flavor the chef should consider walking it. American restaurateurs should save all the kettles, cauldrons, and Old World ironware and find a way to make their place feel less like a cafeteria. They might even discover recipes that don't require a cardiologist to monitor the meal progression.

Too many accessories on the table unnecessarily complicate the dining experience. Customers do not always know what to do with the contraptions in front of them and often use them incorrectly, sometimes with disastrous results. That is exactly what happened to Naples, Florida resident Adeline Cugini when she mistook the stylish chafing dish at a local bistro for a bedpan and used it.^[1] Adeline's children had taken her and her husband out for their 90th wedding anniversary, but failed to consider the serious problems excessive tableware can cause, especially for those less acquainted with modern restaurant trends. Adeline's poor vision combined with the steel dish's close resemblance to the trusted vessel she keeps at her bedside was enough for her to relieve herself in the middle of a dining area. Mrs. Cugini, who had not been to a restaurant since 1965, admits she must have missed a significant shift in people's attitudes regarding what is acceptable at the table, but was delighted to see a restaurant "with such modern conveniences."^[2] Approaching the limits of human understanding was the oblivious anosmic waiter who continued to heat the chafing dish's contents throughout the meal, asking if anybody wanted more.^[3]

Foreign customers are particularly susceptible to disorientation when faced with complicated kitchen hardware as was a Kyrgyz couple last month on their honeymoon in California. Ozbet Isaev and his wife were at a trendy restaurant in downtown San Francisco when a Chinese fondue pot turned their romantic dinner into an unexpected rite of passage. Even the cleverest proprietors never think twice about the function of an apparatus like this, but it is used in a much different culinary context in certain parts of Central Asia where it plays a key role in the sacred ritual of Bahiyrat, which basically translates as "searing of the testicles". Bahiyrat can come at any time during a man's life and signifies his passage into mee sari, or state in which the brain and testes are one. Cultures like Ozbet's do not use this sort of hot pot in food preparation and the mere sight of it signifies the beginning of the ritual. When the waitress set the fondue on the table, Ozbet stood up, dropped his pants, and solemnly submerged his "urugu" in the scalding broth.^[4] Clenching his fists with both eyes shut and performing a loud, disjointed prayer, Ozbet held out for over seven minutes until his wife signaled that the ceremony was complete. Initially startled by the scene, the other customers came to admire Ozbet's spectacular display of concentration and command of pain. By the end of the meal, the entire place had posed for photographs with Ozbet's freshly poached gonads. The owner of the establishment offered Ozbet USD 5000 to repeat the ritual on weekends, but Ozbet explained Bahiyrat comes only once––which is probably pretty good.

What are not so good are servers coming to the table every four minutes to ask customers if everything is all right. The table status check is not exclusive to the United States, but there, servers perform it with unrivaled military rigidity. In many cases, they probably naively believe––or were taught––the nonstop check demonstrates concern, leading to a bigger tip, or that it bolsters job security, as in cases where customers evaluate the service at the end of the meal. In a full house, an unrelenting table check certainly can function as a hint to those finished eating that they should relinquish their seats to other paying customers. Whatever it is, the American-style table status check is not customer service; it is a customer distraction. More than anything it is the stark inability of servers to understand the dining experience. Waiters and waitresses are so myopically concerned with ticking an "All Right" checkbox on their scratch pads––or in their brains––that they cannot see the entire premise is flawed. "Can I get another beer?" has much more of a ring to it than "Could you leave us alone? We will call you if we need you" because it is not a personal attack. The first request pertains to a server's job; the second questions their discretion. Even if a customer has everything they need at the table, they will not always tell servers to stand down for fear their next course will first see the crotch of a cook before it sees their taste buds. Food sabotage is an unfortunate, but real occurrence that pervades restaurants of all ranks and reputations. It also invalidates, at least partially, table status checks. Customers tired of interrogation must literally ask themselves whether they should placate the server or eat a Bacon Lettuce and Snot.^[5] For these reasons, servers still subject to the arcane American tipping system should be aware that obsessive audits of a table's status never guarantee a decent tip, despite all the filled-in boxes on their scratch pads reading "all right."

Nothing could possibly be all right anyway if a customer is inhaling chlorine gas, trying to figure out how to eat chowder out of a Viking helmet. Nobody knows that more than Morris Cavanaugh, a deaf, seafood-loving painter from Boston, Massachusetts who almost died doing exactly that at a café near his home. Cavanaugh was in the middle of his lunch when his waiter, Roc, began spraying a toxic cleaning solution inches from his food, another criminal practice which should be more than enough to fire all the professors at West Point Server Academy. The waiter, who was soaking the adjacent table with a solution of bleach and ammonia that would have earned him a double F in high school chemistry, swears he had no idea his customer was suffering. Roc's table status checks were also useless because, each time, he confused Cavanaugh's signing of "no" for a fist bump request and gave him one.^[6] Roc said whenever he asked Morris how things were going, he just figured Cavanaugh's clasped fingers meant "Right on, man." Meanwhile, Cavanaugh was literally choking to death on the fumes coming from the server's spray bottle. Desperate and immobilized by the poison, Cavanaugh finally abandoned his sign language for body language and literally played charades with nearby customers with his hands on his throat, pointing to the waiter until a woman jumped up and screamed "You were gassed by Roc?! I got it! I got it!"^[7]

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1. ^ "Elderly Woman Clears Restaurant". Gulf Coast Sentinel. Retrieved 05 Aug 2019.
2. ^ "Restaurant Adds Chamber Pots On Centenarian's Recommendation". Retirement Heroes. Retrieved 14 Aug 2019.
3. ^ "Nose-less Waiter Serves Excrement". You Better Believe It. Retrieved 07 Aug 2019.
4. ^ Aytmatov, Dastan; Nogoyev, Satybaldy; Ibragimova, Nadira; Ruzibakiev, Sopubek; Dubbya, T. (21 Aug 2019). "Wealthy Couple Regrets Trading Cattle For Honeymoon". The Bishkek Journal of Central Asian Culture. 43 (7): 577–82. doi:47.4802/342096. PMC 831116. PMID 56143351.
5. ^ Charles Walsh, "Wicked Waitress Blows Nose With BLT", Soldierly Servers Week, February 16, 2018. Cites an article by C. James Greek in Garfield's Restaurant Administration Quarterly, published August 2017.
6. ^ Trevor Savarin (January 5, 2018). The Importance of Sign Language. St. Peter's Holy Press. pp. 226–. ISBN 958-3-4466-1-4302-6-55.
7. ^ Dickinson, Elaine; Oveur, Clarence. "Woman Wins At Charades, Saves Man's Life". Lunar-shuttle-tickets.xr2300 Retrieved 2018-08-02.