You place your orders with one person, then a while later some else comes and hovers over your table and calls the orders back out in question form. Everyone has to raise their hand when their order is called so this new person will know who gets what. I find it a little awkward. Not much, but a little, especially when two people have ordered the same thing. Then it creates another little social face off where the etiquette isn’t clear. Do I claim it first or do I let the other person claim it first or do I claim it for the other person first, etc.
Anyway, any advantages on the serving side of doing it this way? Just curious.
The places I’ve seen this occur - each server is assigned a table, but when food comes up whoever is closest delivers it so that it gets to the table as quickly as possible.
I ate at a restaurant in the hotel a couple weeks ago where they obviously made very good notes on each order. When our food came out it was put in front of the correct person with no questions to us - by a person we’d never seen before.
The person who takes your order and is “assigned” to your table is your server, the person who brings the food, if not your server, is a runner. Runners are there to take food out, bus tables, wash dishes, whatever; they’re just extra hands for any task that needs doing, so if your table’s food is ready but your server is dealing with their other tables or your table has a lot of food, the runner(s) take care of it for them.
I’ve seen people learn the hard way that drinks on a tray are arranged and served in a particular order to maintain balance in the server’s hand. A woman at an adjacent table decided she would help the server by grabbing her drink off of the server’s tray and of course the tray and all the rest of the drinks went crashing to the floor.
This. Most places have an expeditor whose sole purpose is to get hot food into the nearest pair of hands and push them towards the right table. No one wants cold fries, amiright?
Well trained waitrons in a nice restaurant will note each diner’s position on the order ticket. This seldom happens at Taco Bell.
It also often happens in immigrant ethnic restaurants 'cause they only got so many good English speakers - my dad keeps forgetting and asks the water guy questions. You don’t ask the water guy anything - he’s working his way up and learning the language. Save your questions for the waiter.
In my experience, it happens a lot in chain restaurants, like franchise steakhouses or TGI Friday’s or whatever. As DCinDC said, your food is brought to you by a runner, whose only job is to, well, run around and deliver food, refill drinks, restock the silverware, etc. My baseless assumption is that it doesn’t happen as much in nicer restaurants, because in nicer restaurants the servers aren’t as overworked and have time to do things like actually bring you your food, whereas at Crazy Shit On The Wall, the server has so many tables that are turning over so quickly that she barely has time to even take your drink order when you come in.
Quite often the original server is simply too busy at the time when the order is finally prepared. I’ve worked in the kitchen in several restaurants, and you don’t want food waiting around once it’s all cooked for the server who took the order to finish doing whatever it is they’re doing, so the nearest available person is called. It’s a space issue too, we often just didn’t have enough room to keep every order warm whilst we waited for staff to get it, so it was pretty vital for everything to be taken ASAP so we could finish the next order.
It all depends on the individual restaurant policy though. Many do explicitly say that the original server must take the order out to the table, which can cause problems for the kitchen if that person is taking another order or preparing drinks for a table when the food is ready.
This is my experience having worked in both fast food ‘restaurants’ and what you’d call ‘nicer restaurants’.
Each table has a dedicated location at which the server is supposed to stand. They take the orders starting with the person next to them and go around the table in order. Anyone else looking at the ticket knows exactly who ordered what.
“Generic” ticket books have little diagrams at the top showing round and square tables with varying numbers of seats, each numbered in order. Some restaurants just specify things like: stand at the corner of the table closest to the kitchen, start with the person to your left, and proceed around the table in clockwise order.
Then if your food is ready while your server is taking someone else’s order or delivering drinks to a different table, any server in the restaurant can look at your ticket, grab the plates, and deliver them to the correct people with no questions asked.
My GF (who was a waitress), called it auctioning off the food and said it was frowned upon where she worked. Now that she told me about it I notice it all the time at most chain type restaurants :rolleyes:
Yeah, but in nice joints they have the ladies order first, which always embarrasses me. How do they work it then? (Once my nephew interrupted his younger brother because “Aunt Z has to order first 'cause she’s the oldest lady!”)
Back when I was a waitress we usually brought the food out to the tables ourselves (we carried pagers and were paged when the food was being plated to give us a minute to make our way back to the kitchen- it worked wonderfully). The odd time when we were unexpectedly busy or had very large tables and needed someone else to carry food out with/for us we had a shorthand code that we’d write on the order chits next to the food order. It’s been a long time but it was something like Lg for Lady/glasses, MBS - man, blue shirt (MBL for a man in a black shirt) and so on. We kept it to gender and clothing/accessories descriptions…when two people were dressed similarly we’d just mark down “window” for whoever was closest to one, etc. It wasn’t even an official code, but helped immensely to avoid “who had the veal?” situations.
Watch carefully. Even though you’re ordering in random order around the table, the server is writing down your orders by position. If the person to the right orders first, that order will be written at the bottom of the ticket.
Speaking as a diner, who varies his tip depending on service (within reason), upon whose service do I primarily take into account? Eg, the waitress is nice, efficient, and knowledgable, but the runner is an uncaring klutzy food-dumper?
We asked the “runner” how they kept who ordered what straight, and she pointed out a white spot on the tray for person #1 at the table. Dishes were then placed around the tray based on the seat location. This was at a Texas Roadhouse.
