Scenes From an Italian Restaurant

Tonight I went out to dinner with my dad. We went to an italian place that reminds me of a place where I used to work. We both order meals that come with soup or salad. About 2 minutes after the server leaves, she returns with my salad and tells my dad that his soup will be out shortly, that they make it as they go. 10-15 minutes go by. No soup. Just as my dad is reaching is soup/patience threshold, the server comes back and says it'll be right out. Thankfully, the soup arrives minutes later, steaming hot, with a basket of garlic bread to accompany it, but before we finished our soup/salad (and I got a head start...I eat slowly), our meals arrived. My sauce had a slight skin on it and my dad's wasn't that hot.

Sound familiar?

Here's what happened. My dad thought that perhaps she forgot about the soup, but not so. She was writing our order on a guest check, the kind that has duplicates; one copy for the kitchen, and one copy for the server to give to the guest. She wrote down the kind of soup that was ordered. That slip went directly to the kitchen, there was no computer to enter anything into, no middleman of any kind. When she came out with only my salad and said that she makes it herself, this tells me that she has nothing to do with the soup, that the kitchen really does heat each order as it comes. The inordinate amount of time for the soup to come out tells me that the kitchen most likely ran out of that particular soup and needed to get more from the walk-in cooler or wherever they keep the extra soup. This means that they would have had to heat it up from being cold, instead of the warm soup that's kept on hand on the stove or a steam table. While the soup is being heated, they continued to prepare our entrees as if the soup was going out in a regular amount of time. So when the soup finally went out, our dinners were finished and under a heat lamp. They weren't there long though, so it wasn't too bad. And they brought them out in the nick of time or they would've gotten pretty ugly.

It's totally acceptable to heat soup to order. It's not ok to start cooking that table's entrees when you're scrambling to find more soup. As for the server, she was nice and polite enough, but you never bring out only one person's food if you can help it. Being as she makes her own salads, she could help it. It would've also been nice if she told us what was going on. Customers like to be kept in the loop. I appreciated the fact that the entree came out quickly because that means it wasn't sitting too long.

The moral of the story? I'm not sure. Probably that I was in the restaurant business for too long and now I can pick out anything that's going on around me when I'm out. Oh well.


Even with the hiccups, it was a decent meal. Lobster ravioli w/ vodka sauce...yummy. And my dad still tipped 20%. I've trained him well.

Oh. And I hate Billy Joel.