Tonight Mrs. H and I ate at a favorite restaurant that is always quite busy, particularly on Saturday nights during tourist season (like tonight). We expected a wait, but we noticed that while customers were waiting for tables, a few sections (6-8 tables) were cleared and empty. We wondered if they might have been leaving them empty for a bit to give the staff a bit of a break.
Is this a thing g that restaurants do, or are we reading the situation the wrong way?
I think restaurants do that when they are understaffed.
If they don’t have the kitchen or wait staff to serve 100% of capacity they may very well judge it better to refuse customers seating than seat them and have a terrible experience.
We once went to a popular restaurant and were seated within ten minutes, but then we did not get our food for another 45 minutes. We had a hungry six year old with us. It is the worst review I have ever left a restaurant. If they told us the wait was 45 minutes for a table we would have gone elsewhere, eaten pizza or fast food.
Maybe someone called out. Maybe they just don’t have the staff for the busiest time of the week. But they know the situation, and the smart thing to do is let customers go elsewhere.
I see that the restaurant has closed down, and judging from the reviews before they closed we are not the only ones to have that experience. Seems like they ran too lean on staff for the number of tables they had on an ongoing basis.
There is an excellent BBQ nearby; if you are seated there is about a 15-20 minute wait for food.
If you walk up and order takeout, likely under 5 minutes.
Seems odd to me.
I read that the Cheesecake Factory deliberately makes customers wait, no matter how busy, to show how popular they are, that is sometimes called a “False Wait”. Or at least they used to, maybe that is no longer a policy.
They also could be understaffed, which is more likely.
I eat out a LOT. I also make a point of getting known by the staff so can talk a little shop with them and get a seemingly straight answer, not management BS.
If a section is closed and there are multiple customers waiting unseated, darn good bet the server that should be covering that section now isn’t at work. Either they can’t hire enough people, or somebody called out sick or whatever.
If you see tables uncleared from prior diners, they may also be short staffed of bussers, but more likely a surge of customers just left and the bussers are temporarily behind. But if so, you ought to see that resolve itself into clean tables and people getting seated at them pretty steadily.
The entire ICE debacle has created a lot of labor shortages. People grabbed and people who left the country to avoid being grabbed. Or didn’t come here in the first place, but would have under more normal conditions.
Even if the place you go normally hires people that don’t look like ICE victims in waiting, the domino effect still applies. A shortage here leads to a shortage there leads to …
Restaurants everywhere are sucking wind a bit. They can’t raise prices fast enough to cover inflation. The can’t raise wages enough to cover the worker’s experience of inflation. At least not without cratering their revenue as their customers revolt by staying home. Industries with inherently high worker turnover are the first to see the effect of workers leaving for other jobs. The restaurant industry is famous for structural turnover.
In my experience, albeit in a different country, a busy restaurant just means more work for the wait staff. None of my managers would close tables just because of insufficient staffing, and to be honest, a good waiter can service quite a few tables.
I was happy when there were staff shortages, because I worked for tips (there is a pitifully small minimum wage for the industry) and the more tables I was allocated, the more money I made.
(Off topic: The highest pressure work was when I was in the UK, making UK minimum wage in a hotel - meals just added to the final bill, meant no tips ever made their way to me! And this was “silver service” fine dining at a very posh London hotel. I was pissed off if a fellow staff member did not turn up…)
If a section is empty, I’d suspect either there’s a booking or event which will be needing the space shortly, with some possibly that they’re understaffed, but if the restaurant is unable to actually operate when full, they won’t last long.
Nowhere is refusing to seat customers due to wanting to give the staff a break. Hell, even when breaks are legally mandated, you’d not getting one if it’s too busy.
Do you mean 15-20 minutes from when you order to when you receive your food or 15-20 minutes from being at the host stand to getting the first food item or something else? Because table service is different from takeout - with table service, you don’t typically get beverages and first courses and entrees all at the same time, so it will usually multiple short waits , even in a pretty empty restaurant. Say a couple of minutes to get seated, a minute or two for the server to come over and take your order.Another couple of minutes to get the drinks and a few minutes more to get the food.
About the empty tables, on a Saturday night, most likely either they are expecting a large party or someone called out. But at less busy times, there may have been fewer servers scheduled to begin with and they will generally close a particular section down rather than seat people throughout the whole restaurant. If tables 1-10 are assigned to server A and 11-20 are assigned to server B and 21-30 are closed, assigning tables 21-22 to server A and 24-25 to server B because those people want booths instead of tables or whatever is inevitably going to affect service because someone will forget about those couple of tables out of their section.
My first thought is those tables are held for reservations a little later in the evening. Bunching them all together is a bit strange, so maybe it is the section of a particular waiter that called out sick.
I imagine that full restaurants are already overloading their waitstaff, so there’s no slack left to cover someone who called out. More staff just means more underutilized staff, because much of their shift isn’t crunch time.
IME - I worked in a small, family-owned restaurant for six years - we would fill a walk-up to-go order immediately. That ticket would go to the head of the line, to reduce the wait time for somebody sitting in our waiting area. If you got seated, your order was filled pretty much on a first-in first out basis. People who called for take-out were told an approximate pick-up time that would put them in the same FIFO order as seated customers.
I don’t know if our practice was common or if larger/chain restaurants had a different process. I also can’t tell you why places would close off sections, because our place was small enough not to have sections we could close. I think a full house was probably about 60 butts at a time.
On a Saturday evening, during peak season, no one on the staff of a restaurant such as the one in the OP is getting a break for more than a few minutes.
I agree with previous posters: it’s almost undoubtedly a case of the restaurant not having enough waitstaff available last night to give good, timely service to every table, either due to waitstaff calling out sick, or staffing issues.
Management made what was likely a good decision: leave some tables empty, and ensure that patrons whom they seated got a good experience, rather than fill every table and leave guests waiting overly long for service. They would very likely be more willing to let some guests leave when they learn about the wait time for a table, than seat them and generate angry customers because the service was slow.
I was watching a restaurant makeover show and one thing they showed was the wait staff staggering seating people so that they weren’t sending too many orders to the kitchen at the same time. So that may be a factor, as well as the number of available front of house staff.
I talked to a friend who, along with partners in his family, own and operate a number of restaurants ranging from $25-30 ones to $50-60 ones. So from better casual to mid-range in this HCOL area.
He said that when they first started out 30 years ago with one Asian restaurant they would never conceive of leaving a table empty and potentially turn away customers. Daily and weekly cash flow was the lifeblood of the business.
But now operating a largish number of restaurants which have some corporate identity (it’s not a chain, they all have different names and multiple “concepts”), they think more long term and if they are slammed and short staffed, they may indeed not seat a section of a large restaurant, so that those who are seated have an unquestionably positive experience.
Also social media and online reviews are now a thing. 25-30 years ago a bad experience by a guest could not be amplified like it can now. It would spread either by word of mouth or some very limited online reviews.
The OP clearly did not mean “give the staff a break,” as in 10 mins to leave the premises and go outside to have a ciggie (as y’all seem to have interpreted it).
The OP said:
My bold.
I took this to mean “ease up the pressure on the staff to handle a large influx of customers for a bit,” i.e., a little bit of time.
One thing that the OP might clarify (and he did not mention in his original post): were those sections of tables empty the entire time that he and his wife were at the restaurant? That information might help us all give reasonable hypotheses.
I meant it in both ways- work pressure on staff is routinely intense in catering. Places I’ve worked have had the attitude that if the customers are there, it’s your job to find a way to serve them, even if it means basically running for the whole shift.
A place may decide to reduce the pressure for the benefit of the customers, but they sure ain’t doing it for the benefit of the staff.
Not to belabor, which I am about to do anyway, I didn’t mean ease the pressure for some touchy feely, warm fuzzy benefit of the staff so they will be happy, but ease up the pressure temporarily so the staff can actually work effectively, thus ultimately enhancing the customer experience.
Dunno, we were seated in another room from the empty tables. I can tell you that my horseshoe came less than five minutes after I ordered it, so certainly the kitchen was not running behind.
We waited about 25 minutes to be seated, which we expected so, no complaints. It was a lovely spring evening by Springfield standards and we waited outside. There were patrons eating on the outdoor patio but as the customers left they didn’t refill those tables. Then as we walked inside we noticed a few empty tables in a far-ish corner inside. I didn’t take note of what I saw on the way out.
I’m not asking this from a place of complaint, D’Arcy’s can do no wrong by me.