Restaurant Week: A Three Course Prix Fixe War
Brooklyn’s edition of restaurant week begins in a mere eleven days. I am fairly certain that preparations at the participating restaurants are well underway all across the Burrough: colored chalk stockpiled, chalkboards prepped, special menus printed on special menu cards with special menu typefaces. The excitement, if not quite palpable, adds a certain unidentifiable odor to the air. Yet, beneath the surface, there is a black tide sloughing across the gastronomic landscape. There is a war coming. Make no mistake: it will be a war.
I am not here to assign blame. There have been crimes on both sides. There have been enough casualties, enough victims and villains. It’s time to talk peace. My message is love. My message is love.
The battle-lines run along boundaries as old as civilization itself: on one side, the waiters, the restaurant staffers; on the other side, the customers. Theirs has always been a contentious relationship. Each side relies on the good will and charity of the other: tips for service, service for tips. Simple. Yet these concepts have given birth to machinations of such Machiavellian deviance, they would cause the prince himself to blush.
From the waitstaff point of view, it must seem a deluge, a deluge measured in magnitude and effect to equal the running of the bulls. Diners flood in who will never eat there again, gorge themselves on everything but only if it’s on the prix-fixe, who won’t tip, and who will then stumble out leaving nothing but a cloud of broccoli farts in their wake. There’s a deep suspicion that only only ten real people, members of some secret order of foodie illuminati, actually dine during this week of hell, that the rest are, in fact, eating club ringers being bussed in from Passaic, New Jersey, to cover their tracks and generally cause mayhem.
On the other side of the table, the diner feels a certain uppitiness eminating from the restaurant week waiter, a special sort of disdain. The diner is made to feel as if he crawled out from some dark gutter with only the rags on his back and a handful of ill-gotten food stamps clutched in his soot-covered hand. That the waiter thinks he couldn’t afford to come here normally is a given since he chose to come here the one time the food went on sale. If the waiter offers the full menu at all, it’s only because he knows the diner will choose the prix fixe and thus confirm his worst suspicions. The waiter sighs, glares, and speaks in a breathlessly haughty James-Mason-esque wheeze, doing as little as possible to explain anything. In short, the diner is made to feel like a rat scurrying across the subway tracks, watched from above by angry commuters who hope against hope that it’ll somehow impale itself on the third rail.
The war must end. It must end and it can end. We have to call a truce. We must come together against a common enemy: the economy. Times are tough all over and the idea of $23.00 three course meal is only going to sound better and better over the coming depression years. Without diners, restaurants close. Without restaurants, diners have to cook their own meals. Who the hell wants to do that? We are, to put it into the stereotypical big-bad-guy-movie-speech terms we’re all familiar with, two sides of the same coin. We can’t have one without the other, it would be like Crockett without Tubbs, like Peaches without Herb.
I offer these as terms of the truce: the restaurant waitstaff will give diners the benefit of the doubt- no diner is assumed to be a deadbeat hobo until proven otherwise- and diners will tip a minimum of 18% on their meals, prix fixe or no prix fixe.
We’ve got eleven days to make this peace a reality, a peace for us and a peace for our children. Let’s make it happen. Let’s sit down at the table and end this war for good.
What do you think?