It’s a huge letdown when a meal begins with your server telling you that the restaurant is out of one or two entrees and appetizers, even if you weren’t thinking along the lines of those dishes. Instantly you feel that you’ve hit the restaurant when it isn’t in full stride, and all of a sudden you think: maybe I did want the grouper.
But is it an even bigger letdown when a restaurant, having bypassed an announcement of what’s unavailable, breaks the bad news to you only after you’ve asked for precisely what you can’t have.
I wonder.
I also wonder how in the world restaurants run out of some of the items they run out of: not squab, say, but bottled mineral water.
Sometime over the last year I dined in a restaurant that had run out of bottled water. I’m kicking myself because I can’t remember where this happened — it was a restaurant I never wrote about, a restaurant I visited for the purposes of prospecting or for filling in a gap in my restaurant exposure.
But I do recall my and my companions’ surprise. Bottled water doesn’t go bad; a restaurant can keep extra quantities around, provided it has the storage space. (Maybe that’s the issue.)
And if the restaurant runs out, why not run to the corner bodega and get a quick emergency supply, no matter how inflated the price, rather than disappoint customers?
At Borough Food & Drink the other night, the restaurant had run out of iced tea. How do you run out of iced tea? I ask that question not snidely but earnestly, because I know that this blog has readers in the restaurant business, and I’d be curious for an answer.
Let me be clearer: I understand how a restaurant might make iced tea in large batches, and then have those batches used up, and then not be able to pause mid-dinner-service to make a new large batch.
But in a pinch, can’t someone on staff just take a few tea bags — again, you can get those at the corner bodega — and make a small provisional batch, even if that batch doesn’t hew to the restaurant’s usual formula? It probably won’t be a money-losing proposition, and it staves off customer disappointment.
This visit to Borough Food & Drink was one of several recent experiences that prompted my ruminations on the question of when a restaurant should announce what it’s out of and when not: a question I’d love to have readers weigh in on.
Certainly Borough Food & Drink should not have made an iced-tea pronouncement up front: iced tea is a minor, peripheral menu item that the average diner is unlikely to order, an item in which not too many hopes are invested.
But the restaurant was also out of oysters, as a companion learned only when she tried to order them. Should that have been stated by the server beforehand? It’s a tougher call.
At the new Japanese restaurant Soto, which I’ll review in tomorrow’s newspaper, there were more than a few instances when I ordered a dish or a kind of sushi only to be told the restaurant had just run out of it, or that the fish in question hadn’t been available from suppliers that day or week.
Either situation is understandable, and in some sense even consoling: a restaurant that prizes freshness isn’t going to have unlimited supplies of dozens of kinds of fish on hand.
I use freshness, mind you, in the broadest sense, well aware of how much of the sushi sold in the United States is frozen at some point, as my colleague Julia Moskin reported in a front-page story in 2004. Being frozen at some point in the journey to the table and languishing in a restaurant’s freezer for weeks on end are different things.
At Soto I wasn’t put off when a piece of requested sushi was unavailable: the restaurant serves nearly three dozen kinds of a la carte sushi, and sushi is listed on just one of three pages of the menu. So the chances any one diner on any one night is going to home in on the sushi that’s missing aren’t so great that a prior announcement is warranted.
But Soto also ran out of ingredients for composed dishes on other pages of the menu, and also didn’t advertise that fact until a dish was requested.
Should it have? Would that have lessened any disappointment? I think so.
On this general subject of restaurants running out of things, I wanted to note one additional curiosity, a source of amusement as well as suspense: the server who announces that the kitchen has only one order of something on the menu left, and tells you that if you want it, you should decide immediately so that he or she can call dibs on it before some other server does.
Suddenly the meal is a race against the clock. It’s a crisis of split-second decision-making. Were you craving braised veal cheeks? Or has the power of suggestion — the specter of looming competition for those braised veal cheeks — suddenly elevated them to a desirability they wouldn’t otherwise have attained?
You decide you want them. Yes, you want them. You say so, and then you watch the server dawdle on his or her way back to the kitchen or to the electronic screen on which an order is punched in.
The server stops to check on another table. Stops anew to chat with a colleague.
And your heart beats faster. Having committed to those veal cheeks, having decided that there’s nothing in the world you want more than those veal cheeks, you imagine some other diner’s order reaching the kitchen before yours, edging you out of the veal-cheeks race.
And you want to shout to your server: “Run! Run like the wind!”