Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special,
an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week
Good morning, readers! Did you have a good Halloween? Working through your pile of fentanyl-laced Twix? My name is Jaya Saxena and I’m a correspondent at Eater, which means I spend most of my time explaining to strangers and friends that, no, I am not a food critic, and, no, I do not actually have an encyclopedic knowledge of every good restaurant in the country, or even the city I live in. What do I know? Umm, [file not found]. Anyway, welcome to the newsletter.
Recently, I went to one of my favorite restaurants in the city, a place I have been to no less than five times in the past year and a half. The server asked if my partner and I “had dined with us before,” and we said we had, and then he continued to explain the entire menu anyway. I felt for the guy — clearly this was how he had been trained, and had no clue how to proceed without the menu spiel. But sitting there listening to him rattle off how many plates are good for two people when I could have just ordered my drink and freed him to do something else felt unnecessary.
As Tammie Teclemariam wrote in Grub Street last week, the slow-burning small-plates trend is at least partially to blame, with some menus no longer organized into traditional appetizers, entrees, and sides. But I think it all boils down to an honest but misguided attempt at hospitality. A good restaurant experience means you are attended to and that you are never left feeling confused or alienated. Restaurants are assuming their menus, which maybe comprise small plates or potentially tweak some other traditional format, are confusing. But I promise, 95 percent of these new restaurant menus are not as avant-garde as they imagine. It’s not that complicated: I bet most of your customers know that the cheaper things toward the top of the menu are appetizer-size, while the more expensive things toward the bottom are more like entrees. You can trust us to figure it out, especially when we’re armed with the information in the stories below:
- Teclemariam on how small plates are not just complicating this menu spiel, they’re contributing to bad restaurant timing.
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A reminder that the tyranny of small plates has been with us for a long time now.
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Switching up service patter might have its benefits for staffers, too: Service work is exhausting in general, and opportunities to simplify it make the experience better for everyone.
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Food & Wine’s Khushbu Shah on how, overall, the way we think about hospitality needs to change.
— Jaya Saxena
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