I’ve come to lightly dread a server asking “Have you dined with us before?” Not because I feel uncomfortable being new, or insulted if they don’t recognize me from a previous dinner, but because I know my answer does not matter. It’s not a real question, but an overture to a canned speech about every single dish on the menu.
This is tedious enough when you’re being told the menu is ordered from smallest to largest. But lately, Eater staffers and other frequent restaurant-goers I’ve spoken to have noticed that drawn-out explanations of the food are making it into the menu spiel. The friendly idea of pointing out some not-to-miss dishes before diners place their order has turned into restaurants instructing their servers to basically read aloud the whole menu, giving precise descriptions of each and every item.
At one restaurant, “[the server] explained the sections, how they’re organized and then went through several dishes — even after we told him four out of five people had been there before,” says Lauren Saria, editor of Eater SF. Another colleague said a recent server meticulously outlined the first two sections of a menu “like he was practicing a monologue.” Overall, friends and colleagues agree the over-explained menu is happening more often, and is tilting from helpful context toward redundant lecturing.
I go to restaurants far more than your average American. Perhaps I’m just experiencing something that’s actually helpful to the vast majority of diners, and developed to enhance the restaurant experience. After all, a restaurant can’t expect every guest to have studied its menu beforehand. This is hospitality; context and education can make a meal bloom. Restaurants are trying to figure out how much is just right.
“While we don’t necessarily list all of our ingredients in our dishes, we like to describe how the ingredients come together,” says Martine Montgomery, the general manager of the Progress, a “new Californian” restaurant in San Francisco that focuses on seasonal ingredients and flavors from the city’s diverse communities. The menu may list some ingredients, but when describing the dishes to diners, the servers talk about flavor, texture, and how those ingredients interact.
If you’ve attended a tasting menu (or just watched the “Forks” episode of The Bear), this style of service may seem familiar. In these hyper-fine dining settings, the meal is an experience, and also may lack a physical menu, leaving servers in charge of dictating how diners understand what they’re about to eat. But this kind of intimate and intricate communication is trickling down to restaurants with a la carte service and far more casual vibes — and crucially, it’s happening before anyone has had a chance to order, leading me to internally yell “that’s what the menu is for!” like a very hungry Don Draper.
At the Progress, servers are encouraged to use adjectives and emotional language to get at the experience the diner might have while eating, say, a winter citrus salad, or brown butter seaweed noodles. The idea is that by relating to feelings, even if there are unfamiliar elements to a dish, it’s “easier for the guests to understand and get a good expectation versus just talking about what a specific ingredient is,” says Montgomery.
Of course setting diner expectations is a key component of hospitality. And often this information is genuinely helpful — perhaps the menu lists ingredients you like, but when the server says they take a form similar to an aspic, you’d rather order something else. But this style of service risks imposing a fine dining atmosphere where it needn’t be, pausing conversation or flirtation to deliver a speech, leaving diners impatiently waiting for a server to wrap it up.
“It can be annoying, right? Like, you don’t want to have a whole spiel if you’re trying to just sit with your friends,” says Adam Gersten, owner of the New Schnitzel House in Miami. But for him, that kind of engagement and explanation from a server feels more necessary than ever, largely because of cost. With dining out becoming ever more expensive, Gersten says he feels it necessary to explain where ingredients come from, the history of a dish, or just how the chef conceived of things. “If you have a conscience and you’re going to take people’s money, part of it is like, let me explain what we’ve done here,” he says. “Why is this like this, and why you don’t get that at Wendy’s.”
Montgomery and Gersten also acknowledge that your average diner is far more food literate than they were a decade or two ago, and often they’re the ones asking questions about how a dish was prepared or sourced. Ideally, servers are reading the room, seeing who wants to hear more and who just wants to be left alone. Ideally. Perhaps the problem is that when it works you barely notice it; there may be a breezy explanation as the server greets your party, and the server is out before you can react. But when it doesn’t work, you do notice it, and it’s excruciating. When it doesn’t work you can see the strings. The whole show is an attempt to convince you this is a special experience, and worth every penny, before you’ve had a chance to experience anything.
The other night I went to a new restaurant where I assumed I’d be getting the menu spiel, as I had at other restaurants run by the same group. I braced myself for the server, expecting to try my usual tactic of nodding my head so vigorously that maybe they’d get the message and speed it up. Instead, nothing. Well not nothing, but blessed restriction. I felt the anticipation of each dish arriving, which was accompanied by a quick description, over nearly before the plate landed. Instead of hearing every detail about what I was eating in advance, I was left to consider for myself how the flavors listed on the menu were showing up or playing off each other. It’s not inherently a better way to eat. But I would like the option more often.
