Forty-three-year-old waiter B.W. was recently reciting the specials at a trendy new Manhattan restaurant backed by a celebrity chef, something he’s done a million times during his 17 years of waiting tables in New York.
As he went on to describe a pizza with shaved white truffles to a trio of well-heeled women, one of the ladies who lunch became visibly excited.
“Oh my God, is it as good as it sounds?” she asked.
“Of course it is,” he responded. “It’s got white truffles — what wouldn’t be delicious with white truffles? Pizza is good enough, but when you put white truffles on it, it’s even better. It’s delicious. Trust me.”
They did. But what they didn’t know was that B.W. had never even tasted the $125 pie. Rather, management wanted the staff to push the dish.
“In new restaurants, sometimes I feel as if I’ve wandered into a used car lot by mistake — more than ever,” says Post restaurant critic Steve Cuozzo.
“I’ve never seen waiters frankly waste more of everyone’s time, often by literally reading the whole menu aloud. At some places, the waiters push and push to get you to order ‘my absolute favorite.’ ”
“I always suspect that this approach has more to do with what the kitchen is trying to get rid of than what we might actually enjoy,” he adds.
He might be onto something.
These days, ordering dinner can feel like an endurance test: Waiters frequently offer lengthy lectures about the appropriate amount of food to order, droning recitations of menu recommendations and endless questions such as, “Have you dined with us before?”
But can you trust what they actually tell you?
“Honestly, we are actors,” says “Jane,” a 30-year-old server at a popular Williamsburg restaurant, who asked that her real name not be used. “Our job is to make everything sound delicious. You should hear me sell a filet mignon. I was once told it came very close to phone sex.”
The restaurant Jane works at has a daily meeting where employees sample the specials and a manager instructs them on “what we need to push.”
But some restaurants don’t even bother to let servers taste the dish they’re supposed to sell.
“Those three or four days that [the white truffle pizza] was a special, I told every single table how delicious it was, but I never tasted it,” recalls B.W., the anonymous blogger behind thebitchywaiter.blogspot.com, which offers acerbic, often witty tales from the trenches.
“When people ask me which is better, the lobster or the strip loin, do they really think that the restaurant lets the servers sample that?” he recently wrote. “No. We get a shift meal of pasta and salad or tacos. So when I say that the lobster is so delicious because it has a subtle taste of the smoke from the wood in the oven, I am blowing said smoke up your a – – .”
He’s not the only one.
As a 35-year-old server at a Carroll Gardens bistro, who requested anonymity, explains: “If you ask me, what do I like better, [an item] that costs $12.50 or $19.50, I’m going to tell you the item that costs $19.50 — unless it’s really horrible. I’m always surprised when people ask me that. My job is to sell you the most expensive item.”
And then there’s this bluff employed by Jane: “I really dislike wine. I’m a whiskey girl,” she says. “So for red wine I always say the same thing: ‘Medium-bodied, ripe red fruit on the palate, with notes of black pepper and leather.’ With white wine I say, ‘Medium-bodied’ — you can’t go wrong with that — ‘floral, honeysuckle notes on the nose and citrus on the palate with a hint of acidity.’ It sells every time, and everyone always agrees that it’s right on. Every time.”
Other tricks of the trade include intentionally omitting the prices of specials, aggressive wine pouring, bringing bottles of water unbidden, encouraging you to order more food than you need and pushing drinks with dinner. “[Some servers, if they see] a drink that’s almost finished, they’ll reach to take it. If the customer says, ‘I’m not done,’ they’ll stand there like, ‘OK, I’ll wait.’ Like they’re doing you a favor waiting 30 seconds while you slosh down the last of the vodka. It’s a pressure tactic [to get you to order another drink],” says B.W.
That’s not the only ploy waiters use to get diners to drink up — and presumably double their tips.
“I do think some restaurants [make you sit at the bar] intentionally. I went to Butter [for Restaurant Week] a few weeks ago,” recounts B.W. “I was there for the reservation on time, and there were tables available. The hostess said, ‘Your table will be ready in 10 or 15 minutes. Why don’t you go to the bar?’ Two minutes after we ordered our drinks, our table was ready. I just dropped $32 to kill five minutes.”
It’s enough to leave a bad taste in customers’ mouths.
“Unfortunately, the restaurant industry has done a poor job of developing a relationship of trust between servers and customers because of the culture of up-selling they’ve developed,” says Thomas Frank, a former waiter and restaurant “culture engineer” who has helped to open scores of restaurants around the country.
He recalls the time he ordered a salad, only to discover that his entree came with the very same greens.
Of course, some servers use more subtle methods to get you to spend.
“When you see a couple on a date, you ask the guy if he wants a dessert to share with the beautiful lady. If he says ‘no,’ he will look like a cheapskate, so usually he will say ‘yes.’ Girls usually say ‘no’ right away because they don’t want to look ‘fat,’ ” explains Jane.
But it’s not just servers who use psychological tactics. Menu engineers such as Gregg Rapp of Palm Springs, Calif., instruct restaurants on how to build profitable menus — from employing high-priced “decoy” items to make other dishes look cheap by comparison to name-checking farmers to add perceived value.
So, how do you avoid such pitfalls the next time you check out that trendy new trattoria?
B.W. offers some simple advice: “You shouldn’t be embarrassed to order exactly what you want to order — as long as it’s on the menu. Don’t be intimidated by a waiter who’s trying to up their check average with a condescending sneer. Don’t be embarrassed that you just want to share an appetizer. Know what you want, and don’t worry about what the waiter is thinking.”