Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we unpack edible facts for friends and foes alike. I’m your Impartial Imparter, Jon O’Guin, and today’s topic is one that is…a little obvious, and a little sticky, but one I think we can formulate into something worthwhile. And it’s ”how to be a great customer”.

Which is a topic I have some experience with, on both sides of the coin: I work retail, which, while not a 1-to-1 for working in the restaurant business, has some of the same aspects to front-of-house work. And on the other hand, my family are fairly well-known for being…well-known. The restaurant my family went to for my Birthday that I talked about? We’ve gone back twice in the intervening 2 months (once to celebrate with my brother who was in town, and once for a secret upcoming project) and we were recognized by the third visit. We went to a new restaurant/market this last Sunday, and we left feeling like regulars.

I got my first fried bologna sandwich that I didn’t make!

So I’m going to walk you through our family’s tricks, and my insights from behind the counter, on how to be a great customer/diner, and really find the cool stuff a place may have. Why? Well, a couple reasons. The first is that the ‘secret upcoming project’ is next Monday’s post, and Thursday I always do the Holiday Special thing, so if I want a LEGITIMATE tie-in, it’s got to be today. The Second is that I’m going back to Leavenworth to work the Christmas season soon, and that can be a madhouse, so I figured “better start laying the groundwork to remind people how to be human after 18 months of lock-downs”. Thirdly, because it’s the kind of thing I get asked every now and again: “How do you guys seem to know everyone?” Well, here’s the tricks of the trade.

Reform School: The Utter Basics

Don’t be a dick.

That’s step one. And it’s often a hard step to remember in fast-paced retail, or bustling restaurant situations, but the first thing you need to remember is to be a human, and remember that the people you’re interacting with are people too. Like, I get in bad moods all the time. Hell, on Tuesday, I scheduled a breakfast for pick-up, and discovered my car was dead, despite having JUST driven it this past weekend, and having it spend nearly a month in the shop July/August. I lost my SHIT…alone, in the car. And then I walked and got my breakfast order, because the restaurant was ¼ of a mile away. Was I brusque or rude to the servers? No. They don’t control my car. There’s nothing they can do to make my food stay warm over the walk home. I thanked them, tipped, and went on my way.

No no, my greatness is but a mere trifle. The statues are wholly unnecessary.

There are a MULTITUDE of ways you can remember this, especially this year. Supply chain issues are hurting everyone. If the restaurant is out of something you wanted, I assure you, they KNOW it sucks. They’ve been complaining about it to EACH OTHER long before you got there. If the new comics shipment hasn’t come in by the time I go to lunch, I assure you, everyone behind the counter is fully aware that we’re in for a “fun” afternoon. We have customers who specifically come in THAT DAY to get the new stuff, so knowing that I have less time to process the order, and that I’m probably going to have to do it less efficiently so we can get THEM sorted out and on their way, is already wearing on me.

So, as the utter basics, just remember base-line etiquette. Don’t swear at people, don’t scream at them, don’t litter, etc etc.

Got it? Good.

Class Actually Begins: The Good Basics

Build a Good Base/Set Yourself Up for Success

This is a theme I’m going to reference a couple times in the following suggestions, but I wanted to put it first because that’s when you can START to actually do it: You should go into interactions with employees/servers bringing some stuff to the table. Do some basic Googling on the subject, or have some ideas beforehand. Think about when you’re going to be there, and if that’s a great time. It’s much easier to make a good impression on servers during a slower time of year/the week/day, and then carry that over into crunch times than it is to do the reverse. Show up on a Wednesday, or for lunch on Sunday. Like, Google HAS a tool that tells you when businesses are typically busy, work around that a little.

Hey, today is apparently a good day to check out this place. Which I will not identify.

Another important detail in this is keeping the type of business you’re going to in mind. Like, it’s going to be MUCH harder to build any kind of rapport with, say, the staff of a McDonald’s in a college town than the staff of a cocktail bar. This is an advantage to shopping “small” or (semi-)local: these kind of places are more likely (though not guaranteed) to have a sense of community in their workforce, which will extend to you as a customer.

And this may not work. Maybe you don’t gel with a place, or it doesn’t gel with you. That’s fine. Or maybe it’s just not the kind of place you CAN ‘gel’. My family loves a small burger place called the Quick Pik in Tacoma, an old-school  “Order at the window, they’ll call your number when it’s ready” place. The predecessor of the modern McDonald’s or Burger King. Do I know the people there? No, because that’s not a place to stop and chat. That’s the kind of thing you research beforehand. And it might take some time to find a good place. I own an Indie movie called “Ink” (a critical darling about a war for a man’s soul whose most famous scene is a magically-induced car accident) that I can distinctly remember a two-sentence conversation about from over a decade ago: my roommate’s girlfriend at the time asked ‘Jon, how do you find such good movies I’ve never heard of?” to which her boyfriend interjected “Because he watches a LOT of movies no one else has heard of.” I’d glanced through DOZENS of articles about Tacoma restaurants before one of them causally mentioned Moshi Moshi, and now my family has gone there twice. I read articles and watched YouTube videos with the place we went on Sunday, to be rewarded with Nate saying “I’m mad we didn’t come earlier.” You don’t need to be THAT dedicated to research, but just Googling nearby towns and restaurants can give you ideas for places that look interesting.

Have Opinions and Be Open

This is the one that I think a lot of people really miss out on: that middle ground between tabula rasa and enfant terrible. (We apologize for Jon’s expensive vocabulary: he’s been getting into the crosswords again.)By which I mean obviously no one likes a Veruca Salt-style customer: inflexible, demanding, and aggressive.

“I ordered Linguine alle vongole, this is linguine alle cozze!”
That’s a SECOND joke for my Italian readers this week.

But it can often be more just as frustrating dealing with HIDDEN demands, or the ‘blank slate’. Walking into a board game store on a Tuesday afternoon in September and saying “I know nothing about board games, what do you recommend” is GREAT.  Doing it on a Saturday in December, where we likely have someone on the door making sure we’re not violating our building capacity, is LESS great. And it’s also probably a little wrong. Like, you know NOTHING about board games? You’ve never played one, or engaged with one? That seems unlikely. Even stuff like “I prefer Monopoly over Life” or vice versa gives us a framework and set of possible suggestions. But it can be AGONY to recommend a title, and then learn “Oh, I don’t like MECHANIC X/THEME Y”. It’s perfectly fine to have those opinions, but asking me to DISCOVER them as roadblocks to suggestions, after you’ve said “we like all sorts of board games” is frustrating. So be open about your preferences: Nate WILL NOT enjoy a cocktail with tequila or Mezcal in it, unless they are very well masked. I will struggle to enjoy a dish of raw shellfish. These are fine details to lay out.

But just as you’re being open with your preferences, be open to pushing them a little. As I just noted, if you’ve got a tequila cocktail where the tequila is masked, Nate might be okay with it. I can still slurp up a raw oyster or two despite my prejudice. Maybe you don’t normally like worker placement games, but Dune Imperium’s method of handling it will work out for you. Or maybe that’s not something you want to take a $60 bet on. That’s fine!

I couldn’t reach Dune Imperium, but here’s another game that I love that can be hard to sell people on: “So, how this works is that there’s 10 cases, and you just solve them. That’s it. You’ve got newspapers, you can talk to the coroner, and you’re in a race to do it fast enough to “beat” Sherlock.”

Be Curious, but Not Invasive

I would also call this a combination of “situational awareness” and “emotional intelligence”: while at the restaurant on Sunday, we noticed a bottle that we didn’t recognize on the whiskey shelf of the restaurant. So we ASKED what it was. The man we spoke to (who, I don’t know if it came up during our interactions, but a quick google search just now suggests is one of the owners of the business) had someone hand down the bottle, and he talked to us about it for a little bit.

This is one of those little moments of remembering that the people at a business are people: they have to spend time there too. FAR more of it than you do. Just as I recommend having and being open with your opinions, they too should have opinions about the products they sell, and if they don’t, they should know someone around who does. (barring a detail we’ll get into later).

Since this is one THIRD of my overall collection, I’m the Board Game guy at the shop when I’m there. And even THEN, I still defer to JJ on the games that I know he owns and plays more.

Of course, as I mentioned in the first real point, there’s a time and a place for this: if the restaurant is slammed, it’s going to be harder for your server to give you their undivided attention. If there’s a line out the door, try and keep questions fairly brief: “I’m debating between X and Y, which do you recommend?” Or go with an old-standby: years ago, I trotted out a list of foods I use to ‘test’ restaurants that I’m visiting for the first time. It’s ok to play things safe from time to time, especially if you’re not trying to be a bother. That’s what I mean by “invasive”: it’s not wrong to stand-up for yourself when things aren’t working: that breakfast order I mentioned in the “don’t be a dick” section? They didn’t make my apple juice. I noticed it, simply said “Oh, hey, my apple juice is missing.” And they fixed it. I didn’t joke about them being incompetent, or flip out. Most restaurants WANT people to be happy when they leave. If things are wrong, let them know. But do it politely. Even if it feels like your server isn’t giving you enough attention, remember: there might be a dozen things going on you don’t know about, that they’re trying to run around and fix without looking panicked.

The Uncomfortable Ones

Look, I’m not going to lie. Some of the things that will make servers and retail like you are out of your control, or are a little touchy to get into. Like, Race is a factor that is oft-discussed in tipping culture, with a wide-spread belief that Black customers do not tip. Which studies do not back up: while there is SOME racial discrepancy in tipping, we’re dealing in a “80% vs 90%” category. And those studies that suggest these sort of things often come back…confusing and messy. Like, they’re often self-reporting, so it’s a matter of “this person SAYS they always tip at least 15%”, which could be wrong, and they often make big claims off of relatively small differences: in at least one case I saw, all four categories tested were within 2% of each other, and the winner was 0.01% higher than second place. Like, on a $50 tab, they’d all be within a dollar of each other, and the winner would be paying, on average, HALF A PENNY more than second place. But the beliefs persist, and they factor into how servers and customers behave. So of COURSE I have an easier time of it: white men are seen as the easiest people to get to tip well, so people butter me up. They may not be as open to you, but all it takes to dispel that is time, and taking into account our next suggestion:

Budget Generously

Tipping is, at present, the rule in America. And it buys you a lot of goodwill to tip well. The standard is 15-20%, though people argue whether that’s pre-tax or post.  I’m certain the fact that my family, while not wealthy, are always willing to splash some cash at these sort of restaurants are partly why people recognize us. This is another great place to have built that basis of information: know what you’re getting into, and roughly how much it’s going to cost, and plan to drop a little extra for your servers. Paying $125 instead of $120 shouldn’t be a huge drain on your savings, but a server seeing a 25% tip instead of 20% is going to add that bit of information to the rest of their experience of you.

And lastly, but perhaps most complicatedly:

Be Yourself. Or At Least, a Semi-Affable Version of Yourself

One of the reasons that my family is seen as ‘fun’ is that, when we want to be, we ARE. We make jokes, we laugh, we bring the servers into our ‘family’/’community’: we’re not afraid to keep making jokes about each other, and invite them to laugh with us. Our mother regularly jokes that she’d like another table…for Nate and I, so that she can eat in peace.

That doesn’t mean you have to become a stand-up comedian. Far from it: I’ve come to know specific customers because of their quiet and calm demeanors. But just being someone who’s not difficult to interact with, and talking with your server, and being a little distinctive make you stand out.I’ve also got no illusions that the fact that I am 6’2” and 300 pounds, with a huge beard and long hair, make me VISUALLY very distinctive and easy to recognize.  But you do not need to be that dramatic to be remembered.

There’s little value to The Mystery Method of Customer Service. Or the Mystery Method in general.

This one I think can get weird, because when I was younger, advice like it led me to be something like a parody of myself, constantly trying to ‘fit in’ by damping myself down. I’m not suggesting you develop “customer voice” like workers have “customer service voice”, I’m saying that…you can budget your EMOTIONS as well as your money. If you’re not in a state to go out and make minimal interactions with people, delivery with no-contact exists. The place we went to on Sunday? We were considering going on Friday, but determined we’d be in a rush and wouldn’t be as happy. I’ve bailed on trips to Finnriver because I wasn’t in a space to be there. That’s okay. It’s also okay to just be withdrawn in the corner, as long as you’re not snapping at the staff.

And…that’s probably all I’ve got for this one. Sorry it’s a little late: I apparently misplaced my migraine medication after I used it last week, so today I was working, and was like “Why does the hall light hurt my eyes? Oh no.” and proceeded to have to lie down for around 3 hours after dinner, and pulled myself back up just long enough to finish this up. So I’m going to bed, and Friday Jon can handle the pictures.

MONDAY: WE MAKE BRUSSELS SPROUTS. MAYBE SOMETHING ELSE AS WELL, BUT THAT DEPENDS ON A LOT OF IF’S.

THURSDAY: IT’S THANKSGIVING, SO WE’RE DOING A SPECIAL. WHICH ONE? …I SHOULD START FIGURING THESE THINGS AHEAD OF TIME, DAMN IT.