Jason Alden/Bloomberg News
Start-Up Chronicle
Getting a restaurant off the ground.
“You should feel honored we are here tonight,” said the young woman at the bar.
“I do feel honored. Any particular reason?” I asked.
“We had reservations at three restaurants and chose this one.”
“She’s not kidding,” said her boyfriend.
“I’m delighted,” I said. “But I feel bad for the other guys.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We called and canceled.”
“We’re very polite people,” added her beau. “Picky, but polite.”
“Just curious,” I said. “When did you call them?”
“When was it, honey? Six, six-thirty?”
“Yes. Just before we came over to Southfork.”
Restaurant Roulette. It is the unspoken scourge of dining in the Hamptons. The game where people make three or four reservations and cancel all but one. At the last possible moment. And feel good about their manners, for they have gone out of their way to communicate their impending absence. Rare is the no-call-no-show-no-class consumer. In fact, the most pleasant surprise in owning a restaurant in the often churlish Hamptons has been the civility of the guests. Encouraging, appreciative, supportive. It doesn’t hurt that the chef has a Michelin star and a Miró eye, the servers are well trained, the fish are dayboat fresh and the vegetables are plucked from our garden.
Sure, there’s one table a night that is incorrigibly demanding and there’s the random lout on Yelp and the woman last week who yelled, “You’re so local, you stink!” (She wanted a glass of Champagne, but all five of our sparkling wines by the glass are from New York State.)
And yet, with Restaurant Roulette, the cancellations pile up, by phone and by Open Table, by voice mail and e-mail, and even as one tips one’s hat to the effort, one also feels obliged to impart some information that the roulette players may or may not care to ingest.
A 6 o’clock cancellation is a quarter-step above no call at all. Sorry. But what can a restaurant do with the late-breaking news at 6 p.m.? Too late to call the wait list, too late to cut down the waitstaff or the kitchen help, too late to unpurchase the produce. “How many covers?” is the question that echoes throughout the dining room all day. The answer dictates mood and staff and preparation and table assignments and maybe room redesign. In a business of constant befuddlement, the number of diners is the answer to many questions. So each cancellation is a monkey wrench.
And cancellations are most common when walk-ins are least likely: Saturday night. On Thursday and Friday, the walk-ins can offset the annullers. People who travel from the city dare not predict their precise time of arrival — why add to the stress of a longish and unscenic drive? — so they take their chances at the community table or at the bar.
When heavily reliant on walk-ins, we are out of control of our own environment, victims of whim and happenstance, never knowing if or when guests will show up or how many in what clusters. We’d like to guide this ship and arrange all the deck chairs for everyone’s comfort. Eight people arriving unexpectedly at 7 followed by a couple more fours at 7:15 is far different from the relaxed spacing we had in mind for the 16 guests who canceled.
You think I exaggerate? These are the naked numbers from July 8 and 9:
Friday: 94 covers served, 63 cancellations, 2 no-shows.
Saturday: 98 covers served, 96 cancellations, 4 no-shows.
That’s right: Saturday night saw almost the same number of scratches as guests — and 96 people waited until Saturday to let us know they had a change of plans for that very night. What had been scrupulously designed as a steady rain of guests became a stormy night of downpours and drizzle, interrupted by anxious intervals of lightning. With 96 cancellations, it’s like starting from scratch. It jams up the kitchen, stresses the staff, and makes the flow of night resemble the EKG of a tachycardia patient: arrhythmic and uncool.
It was heartwarming that almost 200 people thought about eating at Southfork Kitchen that night. It was disheartening not that half ended up going elsewhere but that they canceled in the penultimate hours. Which is not to say that we would or could handle 200 guests at this point. That would require a revolving door we do not own. We have 99 seats that will be filled at various points, but not in a strict two-tiered seating. About 130 covers, well spaced and unhurried, would suit us, and our guests, just fine.
Still, some people approach Saturday dinner like Sun Tzu. Or Bobby Fischer. It’s a strategic battle and a summer sport. They want to see when the tennis match concludes or how many cocktails are consumed before venturing out. It could be a Hamptons pandemic of gustatory ambivalence or simply waiting to hear what friends feel like eating that night. Let’s not overlook the fun factor or the control factor. If eating is a sexual act, maybe waiting until the last possible second is a cheap thrill, a mild aphrodisiac.
Hardly anyone plays the weekday version of Restaurant Roulette. Earnest reservers all, people have no need for gamesmanship Sunday through Thursday. They are confident that they can get in where they want, so they make a single reservation, and they show up. The casino opens on weekends. It is possible they do not know how the booking process works or perhaps they don’t give a flying fish. After all, they just want to have a nice meal, so why get lost in the backstage labyrinth?
Overbooking by 10 to 20 percent has become commonplace. Restaurants like the odds against that slim chance that everyone will arrive on schedule. We won’t take that risk, wanting to accommodate all our guests in the manner to which they have grown accustomed. No one waits for a reserved table.
Some restaurants charge for late cancellations. One neighboring bistro charges $50 per person if guests don’t cancel the day before. Another high-toned restaurant down the road has a 48-hour cancellation policy with the same $50 bounty per head. But many of the cancelers will successfully protest payment with their credit card company, and then little has been accomplished save creating ill will. Sour word of mouth seems worse than an empty table. And angry ripples will fill a small pond.
Right now, we tell people that confirming has to be done by 1 p.m. on the day of the reservation or else we expunge their names. We suggest cancellations take place by that same time, but the request has no teeth. Maybe we will institute the play-or-pay policy for parties of eight or more, maybe not.
We are fledgling and figuring this out. Rude and intrusive is not our style, yet we feel pushed around by our politesse. We don’t want our dogma barking at our karma, but we sure don’t want our karma to run over our dogma.
Arf.
Bruce Buschel owns Southfork Kitchen, a restaurant in Bridgehampton, N.Y.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e758eb4119391de8bb16eab5b6cbc08e