Last December, while dining alone at Alinea, I sat upstairs in the Salon, washing down mouthfuls of caviar and maple syrup with Krug 2008 (that’s just so Alinea). Just over an hour into the meal — right about the time the food transitioned from feeling musical to operatic — a party of six filled the last remaining table. Not long after that, another table asked to be sat somewhere else as the group’s noise level kept climbing as late arrivers trickled in.
Soon another table asked to be sat somewhere else. Shortly thereafter, the staff even came up and offered to move me to another table, but I declined. Alinea is one of the rare places since the advent of social media where I can be “fully present” and “live in the moment.” I wasn’t going to let what appeared initially as harmless revelry disrupt my meal when there were white truffles on the way. I would just continue to roll my eyes along with the rest of the customers, who were also unimpressed but not motivated enough to move.
But none of us was prepared for what happened next. One of the men at the loud table started to complain about an office colleague: “I hate him so much. He doesn’t do any work. He just gets away with everything because he’s always playing the ‘Jew Card.’” The antisemitic remark prompted a silent exchange of glances asking a rhetorical question even more nuanced than a hint of mint alongside a dollop of ashed onion cream: “What do we do now?”
Encountering rude behavior is common in the service industry, but defining “hospitality” presents a particular challenge when rude behavior rises to the level of bigotry in a fine dining restaurant, especially one with Alinea’s standards. The challenge is even more salient during a presidential election year with a rising number of reported incidents across the country. The definition of “hospitality” must allow for staff to respectfully address conflicts without halting what is supposed to be a tranquil yet memorable evening at one of the best restaurants in the world. How does a staff balance the varying needs of customers without igniting a confrontation with unsavory guests who could inflict more damage? It turns out that it requires a bit of high-caliber flattery alongside a very measured approach that is as calculated as it appears effortless.
The situation in the Salon quickly escalated. I motioned for one of the floor managers and discreetly let him know what we had heard. He went over to the table and let the group know customers had been making complaints about the noise level. For a moment, that seemed to work. My main course arrived, when I could at last use a knife and fork (which is par for the course at Alinea).
But with time, the volume at the offending table once again started creeping up. The man who had bemoaned his colleague’s work ethic said, loudly enough for the benefit of his Salon detractors, “Shhhhhh. Be quiet, you guys. We’re disturbing everyone in the restaurant.”
I slammed my knife and fork down onto the table. I looked over, directly into that man’s eyes, and said, “No, sir. I think it was the ‘Jew Card’ comment that set us all off.” He was speechless. Finally.
In that moment of silence, I noticed that his table had caught up with me in the tasting menu, despite arriving more than an hour after me. Surely they weren’t already on their main course?
Their desserts arrived, and then just like that, they stood up and left. Meanwhile, I hadn’t even been given my edible balloon. Had I done something wrong by speaking up the way I did?
“Not at all,” one of the staff said to me when I finally worked up the courage to ask. “We just invited them on a kitchen tour.”
My balloon came, with what I was slowly figuring out was a warning: At Alinea, beware of the kitchen.
In an email, Grant Achatz declined on behalf of the restaurant to comment on what took place that night, citing the Alinea Group’s policy on respecting the privacy of their guests. What he did say was, “It’s sad really that adults act this way, but it happens a fair bit.”
However, based on observation, the obvious speeding up of the menu progression to quickly get the customers causing the conflict out the door, plus give them the unscheduled kitchen tour, hinted at a well-orchestrated system in place behind the scenes to handle unruly customers — one that’s aligned with the overall experience that Alinea and restaurants like it set out to provide. In other words, Alinea isn’t a dive bar on a TV sitcom. Its staff is not just going to pick someone up by their well-tailored lapels and toss them out onto the street. At the same time though, that image is exactly what most people would expect to happen in those situations, so much so that you can even imagine the chef or his proxies saying, “Get ’em outta here.”
Eater reached out to several restaurants in Chicago to ask about their own styles of conflict resolution, but all declined, citing similar concerns as Alinea. But one manager at a Washington, D.C., restaurant that appears in the Michelin Guide did agree to offer their perspective on an unnamed basis.
“We want to give everybody the best possible experience,” the manager says. “And that’s before, during, and even after their meal.” This involves ensuring that customers are happy before they even walk in the door and stay happy even after they go home. “When you’re feeding already happy people, you’re less likely to have difficult situations.”
The first thing staff will do there if and when an unruly customer situation does arise, this manager says, is to ask themselves, “Does that person have what they need? Is there something going on in their world?” It’s not conflict management as a strategy so much as it is making sure the restaurant hires hospitality professionals with a developed sense of empathy. If that happens to align with the restaurant’s overall mission, then so be it.
While there are elite restaurants like Alinea and the one in D.C. that fall back on discretion and protecting customer privacy first and foremost — albeit in ways tied to the specific brand image of the restaurant — there are others that need to be relatively direct when confronted with bad behavior.
Melanie Amaro, the New York-based face behind @fashionfoodforyou, an Instagram account with 26,600 followers, is several levels up from what some people might label as a standard diner. No stranger to witnessing bad customer behavior at some of the world’s best restaurants, she has seen the variety of ways staff switch to crisis management. Her favorite example occurred at Sushi Noz, the impossible-to-book Michelin two-star sushi counter in New York. Amaro recalls a time when the customers sitting next to her didn’t want to eat their sushi. “They just let it sit there,” she says. In Japan, to outright reject the food being served is considered an insult, and to do so in front of the chef at an omakase would be the worst possible insult.
Then, according to Amaro, one of those customers perhaps inadvertently escalated the situation. Perhaps the man was unaware that at an eight-seat sushi counter, everyone could hear him and that he took things too far when he said to chef Nozomu Abe, “Yo, bro. Let me buy you a pizza or something.” Rejecting the chef’s food to his face is one thing. Suggesting a substitute for the chef himself to eat is a declaration of war.
“Noz handled it with grace,” she says. “He looked right at the guy, smiled, pointed to the sushi, and said, ‘One bite, eat right away.’”
Direct confrontation, in a Japanese cultural setting, is a last resort, with everything possible being done up to that point designed to avoid it at all costs. That cultural subtlety, however, is at direct odds with how much Americans value directness. The staff at Sushi Noz clearly realized this and adapted, and chef Abe, who in Japan at any similar elite omakase restaurant would be revered by customers, simply demanded atonement.
For most of us, dining at a restaurant considered to be among the world’s best is already an embarrassing privilege that is pressure enough, so is it too much to know what the rules are in advance? To frame the question a better way would be to ask, what do elite restaurants themselves expect of their customers?
The answer is obvious. They want their customers to enjoy themselves. That’s “hospitality” in a nutshell.
At a sushi counter, that might mean being gracefully corrected in front of everyone. At Alinea, however, it means: Beware of the kitchen. If a customer is invited on a kitchen tour, then that customer should ask themselves if they have done anything wrong.
While Achatz would neither confirm nor deny, the circumstantial and anecdotal evidence from others in the industry suggest that this kitchen tour was not the special treatment it could have been for an otherwise pleasant or VIP guest. Instead, it was meant to get them away from the Salon as quickly as possible.
After I started putting two and two together that night, I asked one of the staff what happened to all of them after the kitchen tour. Was there drama? Was their shouting? Were there tears?
“Their coats and belongings were waiting for them at the end,” he said professionally and with respect, as befitting the overall service experience at a world-class restaurant. “Along with the door.”
