actually, I’ve found that whipped butter, as opposed to salted butter, needs to be brought to room temperature before being “spreadable”
I wonder if it is actually butter or margarine being complained of.
~Max
The health department would rather you refridge. The PTB don’t care if your butter broke your toast.
Put the pat of butter next to your cup of coffee.
I can’t remember if this was addressed by Cecil or the Imponderables books- It’s butter. Legally, any restaurant serving margarine is required to have it colored and shaped differently and to proclaim in a certain size font on their menus that it is margarine. Unless your restaurant is vegan or strictly kosher and serving meat, the tiny savings made by serving margarine instead of butter are not worth it.
I have no idea what that is referring to, and I had cold cassettes in cold cars in the 80s and 90s.
It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that would be easy for a restaurant. You know pretty well how much butter you’re going to go through in a day, so you set that amount out at the start of the day, or a bit less. When it starts running low, you put out a little more. You might sometimes have to resort to cold butter for the last handful of patrons, or occasionally throw out a few that were set out and never used, but with restaurant-level economies of scale, that’d be negligible.
I’m surprised you don’t pay per butter pat.
It would depend. A lot of restaurants, especially the open air ones, the butter would melt if it wasn’t artificially chilled. Might as well serve olive oil. Then you have the seafood restaurants where it is supposed to come melted, in a little bowl.
~Max
Restaurant kitchens are much warmer than home kitchens. I bet the butter would melt if you left it out. And yes, food safety rules.
The kind of restaurants that ought to be caring about the spreadability of their butter have server stations in the front of house that are not kitchen-hot. or could certainly have other solutions. They usually manage to serve their red wine at a proper temperature, why not their butter?
The answer of course is that not that many people are like me and the OP who find stiff butter useless.
Thanks @DrDeth! I like to leave the butter out during the day so that it’s at room temp. My husband quickly puts it away in the fridge when he sees it out. He recently sent me this article This Is How Long You Can Leave Butter On the Counter, According to Land O’Lakes (msn.com) that says not to leave it out more than 4 hours (which I thought was a ridiculously short time) and to throw it out if it’s left out for longer. I told him to consider the source of the article (Land O’Lakes) and I plan to show him the USDA guidelines.
There’s a difference between whipped butter and the stuff called spreadable, which is butter mixed with an oil like olive or canola.
I gotta say I have never encountered this problem. Most places keep a small amount of butter in the fridge, but it is easily used at the table.
Huh? Restaurant butter is almost always far too hard to spread. It should be about the consistency of mayo. If it’s the consistency of clay that sucks lots.
Having worked in many a restaurant way back in the day, it was always refrigerated because of the fear of God of being fined by food inspectors instilled into the management. And of all of the dumb-ass stupid shit management has tried to pull in my years doing those jobs, this is probably the one that I most understand and care the least about. (Except for maybe serving booze to minors and over serving drunkos)
One exception to cold-ish butter (maybe just shy of clay as @LSLGuy mentions) is for those of us who in a previous poll mentioned liking both the melted butter AND a bit of solid butter on our bread. Super warm, spreadable butter doesn’t quite work for my small subsect of butter eaters, at least, not on warm bread.
Room temperature bread (or worse, rolls that ALSO just came from some refrigerator or equivalent) doesn’t benefit from colder butter however. 
I actually prefer my butter cold. Not ice cold, but i don’t want it the consistency of mayo, i want it a lot firmer than that. I like the buttery hit i get when it melts in my mouth.
I wait for my toast to get cool enough that it won’t melt the butter, and then carefully shave cold butter into it.
I realize i am in a minority, and I’m sure restaurants aren’t catering to my preferences when they serve cold butter. But i appreciate it.
(And if i got butter the consistency of mayo, I’d wonder how long it had been sitting out, and would be a little suspicious of the place, honestly.)
We don’t either. I guess we use it fast enough that there’s never been a problem.
I suspect there’s an element of damned if you do (serve it cold) and damned if you don’t (serve it warm) because people will complain either way, and at least serving it cold proves they stored it correctly and there aren’t any food safety issues.
I’d almost guarantee that if a restaurant served butter at room temp, a sizeable number of people would be turned off by it and send it back because “who knows how long it’s been sitting out?”.
Mind you, i don’t think anything dangerous happens to butter. But it does develop an unappealing “oxidized” flavor eventually, and that happens a lot faster at room temperature. I always taste warm butter hesitantly, afraid it will taste a lot off. And if they leave the buyer lying around, what else do they leave lying around?