Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (28 page)

If there’s a possibility that some true emergency will arise during the meal, leave your phone on vibrate, give your companion advance warning, apologize, and promise to keep any call as short as possible. Should the emergency call come, answer in a stage whisper, ask the caller to hold on, and then excuse yourself from the table to take it outside or back by the bathrooms, where the phone booths used to be and still should be. (
Yoo-hoo,
restaurateurs—isn’t it time some of you started a trend?)

It’s best to avoid engaging with restaurant cellboors and other atmosphere-eaters. A restaurant is not a venue for do-it-yourself justice.

Believe me, when some underparented brat (of five or fifty-five) is given the run of a place, there’s nothing I long to do more than turn to the cur’s sorry excuses for parents and hiss something really helpful like, “A pity you didn’t use birth control!” But, even a less offensive and utterly justified remark, such as “Do you mind asking your little boy to stop driving his toy truck across our appetizer?” can cause a crossfire of ugliness, since rudesters who act out or allow their children to tend not to fall all over themselves to be accountable for their shortcomings.

Whenever another restaurant patron’s rude behavior is outrageous and persistent, your best bet is seeking out a diplomatic emissary—the manager—whose ultimate job is acting as the guardian of customers’ pleasant dining experience. More important, he’ll come off to the louts as more of an authority figure than you. (Even the rudest patrons are more hesitant to snarl “Fuck you!” to a restaurant manager than they are to some annoyed biddy at the next table.) The manager may not have the superpowers to stop the awfulness right there in the moment, but he can blacklist the cause of it from future visits, and he may comp you on some of your meal to make up for how your table has turned into a receiving station for hell.

The Check Republic: Paying the bill when dining with others.

It’s a group dinner. One person orders a green salad and a glass of water. The guy drinking glass after glass of fine scotch orders a steak—the sort that comes from that kind of cow they hire somebody to read poetry to and give daily massages. Eventually, the check comes, and the steak eater glances at the total and says, “Let’s just split it.” The greens eater, not wanting to seem stingy, gulps and forks over for the most expensive dinner salad in the history of dining.

When dining with a group, unless your friends favor asking everybody to pay what they owe, you should assume that the check will be divided by the number of people in attendance. If you can’t afford that or will feel cheated, send regrets. It’s simply easiest to divide the check into equal parts, and the pleasure of dining with friends can turn very displeasurable when followed up by a United Nations–style negotiation about who ate what and who owes what, down to the penny.

That said, a dinner check should not turn into a form of wealth redistribution. The person whose meal and drinks cost substantially more than somebody else’s should take the lead and make things fair. If that’s you, you might turn to the vegan next to you who had only the $12 tofu platter and a Coke and say, “You just put in $20, and I’ll put in the other $70 of your share since I had that glass of port from the bottle wept on for three decades by a French monk.”

Some people think the solution is asking for a separate check for each person at the table. This request is easiest on your waiter if you make it before you order and if the restaurant has a computerized ordering system. Even if they don’t, it’s probably not a big deal if there are just two of you at the table. But when dining en masse, be advised, as Los Angeles chef and restaurant business veteran Nick Coe points out, that many places put a limit on how many ways a check can be split. “Usually, four is about the max.” And maybe reconsider whether laziness about math or your failure to weed out your “friend,” the hardcore freeloader, really justifies turning your waiter into your accountant. “The guy has to take back a stack of credit cards and cash and run it all,” Coe explains. “It’s a bit of an imposition.”

Yelp is supposed to be a reviewing site, not a step stool to power.

Before you post that one-star rating and the scathing review, take a moment to consider your motivation. Did the restaurant or other business really fail you in some egregious way? Or, is it that you’re a frustrated comedian and Yelp is the best venue you can book yourself into? Or, could it be that you have always wanted to open a restaurant and know you could have done it better than this schmo?

Chef and restaurateur Coe, who has worked everywhere from froufrou eateries to a beachfront biker bar, thinks the best (and fairest) reviews by patrons are on dining-specific blogs and sites, like Eater, Grub Street, Chowhound, Open Table, and Urban Spoon, which tend to attract serious foodies. Yelp does, too, but the foodies’ reviews are mixed in with those from people seriously angry at their corner hardware store who decided to pop off a quick dig against the bistro next door as long as they happened to be logged in.

Coe notes that “a lot of people fancy themselves [professional] restaurant reviewers when they hit Yelp” but slam places “without a whole lot of expertise about restaurants or knowledge about food or dining or anything else.” He explains that professional restaurant reviewers typically go back to a place a few times and understand that there’s a startup curve. But amateurs will go to a brand-new place that’s just getting on its feet and trying to work the kinks out. Thinking that they’ll build their credibility as a reviewer, they’ll “just rip it apart for what are actually minor transgressions.”

Coe also feels that in the past ten or twenty years, restaurant customers “have lost what their side of the bargain is, which is to behave like decent human beings and not like petty tyrants because they pay the bill.” Many go into a restaurant with “a set of bizarre expectations,” like the notion that the kitchen of a place with some special, complex cuisine should drop everything and rework a dish to cater to their dietary whims. When the waiter explains that this is impossible, the patron may stick it to the place in the form of a negative review—and never mind how busy the kitchen was or whether the request was impossible in the realm of culinary physics.

Others posting reviews don’t limit themselves to assessing the restaurant. They’ll knock stars off their review of a place they liked because they went out to their car afterward, blocks away, and there was a homeless guy next to it—“totally extraneous stuff,” says Coe, that unfairly cuts into a restaurant’s ability to attract new customers.

To write a fair review, Coe advises that you make it reflect your actual level of knowledge. If you aren’t a restaurant expert or a foodie, he suggests you say something like “Well, I’ve never had this before, but I didn’t really care for it” or “I loved it” or “It tasted salty to me.”

“That’s fine,” he says. “It tasted salty
to you
. But to say ‘Naw, these guys don’t know how to cook; this thing had way too much salt in it; they’re idiots,’ well, then you’d better know how much salt
should
have been in it.”

Consider also that a restaurant review site may not be the best place to resolve your disappointment with a meal. Coe, like tipping expert and former waiter and restaurant manager Steve Dublanica, points out that many people don’t realize that “in any halfway-decent restaurant, if you have a problem with
any
aspect of your meal, you need to talk to somebody”—ideally, the manager, whose job it is to see that customers end up happy. As Coe suggests doing when your reservation isn’t honored in a timely manner, you can call or e-mail the next day if you’re uncomfortable saying something about a problem in the moment. Of course, this tack takes accepting that the people who run and work in restaurants make mistakes—same as we all do on the job. We should maybe give them the chance to make good on theirs before we destroy them on the Internet.

PARTY MANNERS: WHAT TO DO TO HAVE THEM AND WHAT TO DO WHEN OTHERS LEAVE THEIRS HOME

It’s an invitation, not an invitation to be rude.

For many party hosts, the disappointing discoveries about one’s friends, colleagues, neighbors, and even family members start well before the party—weeks before—when they send out, oh, twenty or thirty invitations and get only two or three replies.

Documentary producer/director Courtney Balaker, who sends e-vites, says, “In the old days, if someone didn’t respond to your snail-mail invitation, you could at least give them the benefit of the doubt that they never received it or that it got swept under the couch, eaten by a possum, etc.” But apparently unbeknownst to some of today’s nonresponders, some electronic-invitation sites allow the sender to know which guests have read the invite. “When you see that it was opened a week and a half ago and [there’s still been] no response, it feels like a blow-off,” says Balaker, “which maybe it is.”

We’re all busy, and there’s a lot competing for your attention in your e-mail inbox, so it may help to look at every invitation you get as a quick test of friendship—or at least decency. All it takes to keep your host from feeling that you don’t give a bent crap about them is maybe twenty seconds of your time to either respond right away or put a note on your calendar to respond in a few days. At the very least, say
something
, like explaining that you have a conflict, telling them when you’ll let them know and then coming through on that, too.

If you’re on the inviting end, you actually might want to rethink using an e-invitation. They do make it easier to create the invitation and log RSVPs, but sadly, requiring the smallest task of someone—just clicking on a link and waiting for a page to load to reply—may cause them to put off responding, increasing the likelihood they’ll forget entirely. People may also feel more compelled to reply when the invitation appears to come directly from a person rather than an invitation system. Because of this, e-commerce and social-media expert Jackie Danicki, like me, favors putting the entire invitation into an e-mail, meaning guests only need to click
REPLY
and type in a quick message.

Some will perhaps find the rest of Danicki’s approach too hard-line—but perhaps just until they plan a sit-down dinner party and send out invitations and only three out of fifteen people have the courtesy to RSVP. Danicki explains: “I give a cutoff date for RSVPs in the original invitation. If they try to RSVP after that, no dice. Those who accommodate bad guests have only themselves to blame. I set it up so I don’t have an excuse to be annoyed at anyone. I’m not looking for violations of basic etiquette; I’m preventing them. I don’t browbeat people in advance, either, and I decline invites from hosts who include preemptive etiquette lectures in the original invite.”
⁵¹

When you’re invited to a party at someone’s home, always bring a bottle and/or a gift—and see that it remains there when you depart.

Do not leave the party with alcohol you brought or, even worse, alcohol you didn’t—or—worse still—the silver or the host’s wife or girlfriend.

Barefoot in the Party: No, you don’t get to make your guests take their shoes off at the door.

Yes, they take their shoes off before entering a residence in Asia. Good to know for when you are throwing a party there. In much of America, asking your guests to remove anything more than their coats is appropriate only if the party you’ve thrown is the kind where everyone goes off to a bedroom with somebody else’s spouse. Otherwise, you should refrain from asking your guests to take off their shoes or any other parts of their ensemble.

And no, you don’t get to make your guests slip paper crime-scene booties over their shoes. They surely would have dressed like CSI techs if they thought that enhanced their look. Also, these booties tend to not grip well, and causing your guests to leave the party as quadriplegics isn’t exactly the mark of gracious hosting.

“But … but … what about my white carpets?!” you ask. Well, either don’t have parties or hire a carpet cleaner afterward. You should also get your hardwood properly sealed so you won’t feel tempted to try to separate the ladies and their stilettos. Your goal when throwing a party should be making your guests as happy and comfortable as possible. At most, if you are worried about what people might track in, you can place a big doormat in your entranceway with a small sign beside it, “Please wipe feet well before entering.”

Can you bring your dog? Well, is the party taking place in a kennel?

Unless the invitation says “all species welcome” or you are sure this is the host’s attitude, you cannot bring your dog, your cat, your ferret, a swarm of tsetse flies, or any creature requiring a pooper-scooper by John Deere. The same goes for bringing your offspring. Think twice about even asking to bring them, because many hosts will feel pressured to say yes when it’s the last thing they want. The fact that you were unable to find or afford a babysitter or a bull wrangler (which, for some kids these days, could be one and the same) does not entitle you to singlehandedly shift the ambience at a party from adult-centric to kid-and animal-centric.

When you are the one throwing a party, be advised that the earth shifted its orbit a few decades ago and now revolves around many people’s children and animals. Be prepared to be pestered by some parent or pet fancier to allow their darling to come to what you intend to be a sophisticated, adults-only,
humans-only
affair, and be prepared for a tantrum (from the parents or pet owner) when you say no. But do feel free to say no and to calmly stand your ground. Adult parties should be thought of like R-rated movies—an environment inappropriate for young children and livestock. Also, parents who can’t fathom why their children shouldn’t come to cocktails at 8 p.m. tend not to understand the need to actually, you know,
parent them
once they’re there.