Maybe I’ve entered the Andy Rooney phase of my life, but I can’t help but feel irritated by this at restaurants. When I was younger, it seemed like the common procedure was for the same person who took your order to be the same person who brought the food out. They would know what everyone already ordered and wouldn’t need to ask.
Nowadays, it’s far more common for someone else (another waiter or busboy) to bring the food out and have to ask everyone what they ordered. Then the waiter will come by a couple minutes later to make sure everyone got the right thing.
Am I the only one who is bugged by this? It’s even more annoying when you have a big group with multiple people ordering the same thing with different variations. Inevitably orders get swapped and people think their food is just wrong, not realizing that someone else has their order.
I have never had a problem with needing to raise my hand or point to indicate whose food is being brandished by an overburdened server. If you got the wrong person’s order under those circumstances, you botched it.
I prefer it that way. It means the food got to my table more quickly after it was prepared. I’d rather say “I had the chicken parm” and get a meal that was waiting as short a time as possible than be able to be silent and get a meal that was sitting in the kitchen for 8 minutes while my waiter was taking orders, getting drinks, etc for another table.
I assume restaurants started using food runners because it’s cheaper in some way. Perhaps servers are more expensive so with food runners, you can have fewer servers covering more tables.
Doesn’t annoy me except when they don’t know their own entrees and can’t figure out if the burger plate they’re holding is the cowboy or double decker or whatever.
Get off your phones. Stop talking to each and PAY ATTENTION when the guy is standing there with his arms full of plates saying “Bacon fritata with no potatoes. Bacon fritata with NO POTATOES.”
Also…how about just F**king remembering what you ordered??? I don’t know how many times I see somebody who doesnt remember what they ordered or doesn’t even know what they ordered.
“What’s this?”
“Its the bacon fritata you ordered.”
Now that I’ve got all that off my chest:
You’re right. They arnt supposed to auction off the food. Barring people moving around, everyone running the food should know where it goes based on the seating position.
The only times I have encountered this is when I eat at the bar. I’m keeping my eye on the bartender to see if they have my order ready when the runner appears at my side asking if I ordered the steak. They are pretty good at knowing the location, I assumed the seat number is put on the order.
We were at a very nice restaurant recently and the owners sat with us after our meal and shared after dinner drinks (on the house). They explained their use of runners, and how it worked for them.
I have to say our experience was perfect. Our runner was the same person who seated us and explained the specials that night. He had certain responsibilities and he handled them well. We also had a separate “drink person” who handled cocktails, sparkling water, and wines. She convinced me to try a smoked drink, served under a bell jar with smoke infusion.
Usually in my experiences it’s not the people on their phones who have the issues. It’s my older relatives who completely blank on what they ordered by the time the food comes out. Although some times it’s the runner who doesn’t know if an item is special or not.
“One of these linquini’s isn’t supposed to have mushrooms.”
“Uhhh…”
Anyway, good to know that am I pretty much alone on this. Now everyone get off my lawn.
I’ve rarely encountered this, but, when I have, the experience has been no different than when the original server did it. Most servers don’t remember who got what very well, either, especially in a larger group.
It’s only in smaller groups where they would have a chance to remember, unless they had some sort of system.
Oh, and while it may not be “proper,” I prefer places that include ways to tell which order is which. I remember a place that had indicators on the plate for the doneness of the steak.
This could even be extended to a system that actually keeps track of which position in the table ordered what.
In my 30 years in the restaurant business I have had food runners working in all of the restaurants I have operated. If people are trained properly there will be no auctioning off of food since the runner will have a copy of the ticket showing position/seat numbers. The server is expected to stop by within the first few minutes to check that everything is as expected. This system can fail for a lot of reasons but the three I find most common are:
[ol]
[li]The guest forgets what they ordered. As odd as this may sound it is not that uncommon. A person may be considering a couple of different things and then forget which one they decided to get.[/li][li]People change seats. This typically happens with larger groups but it will always screw up thing since items are ordered with a seat number associated with it.[/li][li]The server makes a mistake. No one is perfect of course but this is easy to avoid by simply repeating the order back to the guest as it is being written down. Servers who don’t write things down and try to remember everything are the ones who do have this problem most often in my experience.[/li][/ol]
Using runners frees up servers to attend to other things like getting drinks from the bar. It also expedites getting the food out of the kitchen and to the guest quickly. Servers standing around in the kitchen waiting for food to come up are servers who can’t get you a drink or greet you and go over the menu or make recommendations. Honestly, food runners are not a new thing but are probably more common at restaurants where a higher level of service is expected. YMMV.
I don’t care for it too much either, and annoyingly, it was the set-up in a couple of my regular places back in SLC.
If there is one person who goes out of their way to take great care of you, and they are working a shift with a coworker who is indifferent (or actually downright unfriendly) there is not a practical way to hook up the Good Cop with an extra generous tip without having it split with the lazy idiot who is too busy hitting on young college girls tripping balls on smuggled Norwegian Robitussin to ask if you want another double Harvey Wallbanger with a sambuca & sarsaparilla chaser, so you either have to reward mediocracy or ignore excellent service.
It my experience, it’s usually the mid-level restaurants where it’s the worst. Lower-end, they aren’t going to have runners. High-end, they’ll have well paid and well trained runners. In the middle, they’ll hire runners but not actually pay them or train them enough to do a good job.
Not necessarily. Some places, and I don’t know how prevalent they are, make the waitron “tip out” a certain percentage of their tip to others, presumably runners included if they do not split the tips 50/50, and those tips aren’t necessarily on top of minimum wage but sometimes used as a supplement to bring the runners up to their wage rather than having the restaurant pay all of the wage.
I am quite surprised at the number of posters who have not encountered this. It seems to have been the norm for at least the last 15 years in my travels.
But let me say, I agree with the OP. And to Kolak of Twilo, I just want to let you know that a if this doesn’t work perfectly, a common reaction to this practice is anxiety and confusion.
In my experience:
One person seats us - fine, I get that.
A second person greets us, and takes a drink order (are they my server, or just taking my drink order? Time will tell!)
A third person delivers the drinks (Something is wrong? I tell them.)
A fourth person appears, our server, to take our food order! (So, do I also tell them about the something wrong with the drink order? No? Only the drink order taker?)
Eventually, a fifth person appears with our food (Maybe something else to report? Could we have a side of mayo? WHO DO I TELL?!?! Still waiting on the drink?!?!?)
A few minutes later the primary server returns…
OK, efficiency and all that, but this system is causing chaos IMHO.