Chefs Bite Back
In Some Cases, the Customer Isn't Always Right
By Candy Sagon Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 4, 2003; Page F01
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Chef Gillian Clark has had it up to here.
She's had it with customers who order her lovingly prepared food at Colorado Kitchen and then demand hot sauce or ketchup to dump all over it before they've taken a single bite. She's had it with diners who insist that she prepare something special for their kids, even though Clark, the mother of two, deliberately offers small portions of certain entrees for youngsters. She's had it with Atkins diet followers who order the steak and potatoes at her Northwest Washington restaurant, then have the chutzpah to ask for extra steak instead of the potatoes. And she's especially torqued off with people who want to completely sabotage the carefully thought-out entrees she's offering with their litany of demands: Can I have another vegetable, I want a different sauce, can you leave out the garlic, don't use any butter, could that be fried instead of broiled, and, oh yeah, can you cook the beef "rare but with no pink at all"?
No, she told these customers. N-O. And when they insisted and badgered and got huffy about it, she did something more: She took to the Internet.
Four weeks ago, she wrote a letter to Post food critic Tom Sietsema and asked him to post it on his weekly online chat. It began, "I could write a book about the ridiculous requests that come out of our dining room. . . ."
She went on to argue that going to a nice restaurant is like going to a concert. You don't ask the conductor to change the music to suit your liking; ditto for a chef. "I explain to them that they are in my restaurant. And they must have the flounder the way I make it," she wrote.
The reaction was immediate. People wrote in calling her everything from a "spoiled, four-year-old child," to "whiny" and "pretentious."
"How dare she have the audacity to suggest that she knows my likes and dislikes better than myself," wrote a reader from Rosslyn. "Isn't the restaurant experience supposed to involve providing a customer with a meal they enjoy?"
"Who is the meal for? Get over yourself," fumed a D.C. reader.
Within days Clark's letter was posted on other sites, provoking equally heated debates. On the popular Web log MetaFilter (
http://www.metafilter.com), 174 comments were logged from visitors as far away as England and India. Many of them were pro-Clark. "If you don't like how a chef prepares an item, order something else or do us all a favor and go somewhere else," wrote one waiter.
"If you'd rather have things done your way, eat at home," wrote another.
The other side was just as stirred up: "Yes, stupid diner. Shut up and eat what we put in front of you, you ingrate, and don't forget to add a 25% gratuity," went one such comment.
So who's right? The trained chefs who feel their expertise is being ignored? Or the paying customers who want what they want -- no matter the reason. Consumer behavior psychologist Monroe Friedman of Eastern Michigan University says the old fast food slogan of "have it your way" seems to have been accepted as a life philosophy by consumers these days. "It's that entitlement mentality that says you should be able to customize anything, from a lowly burger to a five-star meal," he says.
But New York food and restaurant consultant Clark Wolf says chefs "who act like jerks" aren't going to last long, especially in these weak economic times. "You can't promise customers you'll do anything. It can't be done. But if you don't do what the customer wants at all, you'll go out of business," he says.
"There are a bunch of us irritable chefs," admits Mark Furstenberg, owner of the Bread Line, a bakery and cafe near the White House. "I'll be the first to admit that I'm not Mr. Customer Service."
Like the irascible men behind the counters of New York's famous delis, Furstenberg is known for letting customers know what he thinks of their cockamamie requests. Want to load up your roast turkey sandwich with grilled peppers and Swiss cheese and tapenade? Expect to be told, "What's the point of even having that fresh turkey I season and roast myself every day. You can't even taste it with all that stuff."
Last December a woman asked for tomatoes on her tuna sandwich. Furstenberg told her he doesn't serve tomatoes in winter because they're not in season. She pointed out that the supermarkets have them. "But those are pink and hard and I won't serve them," Furstenberg told her. "Haven't you heard that the customer is always right?" she asked, getting annoyed. "Yes, but that's a silly idea. The customer is not always right, the customer is simply the customer," he shot back. The woman left.
"I don't defend my irritability," he confesses. "It's not a good way to be. Other chefs, better than I, are more accommodating. But I can't help but feel, why do people even come in here if they want to doctor the food the moment they come in? We don't want to be personal chefs. It's what the customer wants, I understand that. I just don't want to do it."
Bob Kinkead is another chef not known for suffering fools gladly. Even so, the chef-owner of Kinkead's in downtown Washington and Colvin Run Tavern in Vienna, says certain things are easy for a restaurant to do: a sauce on the side, a different vegetable, a garnish subtracted (like no peanuts). "I have friends who won't serve [their customers] a well-done steak. I figure, hell, I'm not eating it. If they want to ruin a perfectly good piece of meat, it's their 30 bucks," he says.
As for Gillian Clark, she is surprised her letter generated so much anger "from customers who didn't see it from my point of view" -- namely, that of a chef who works 12 hours a day or more, in a kitchen barely big enough for three people, carefully crafting her menus to balance taste, texture, color and the height of flavor from seasonal ingredients. "When you pay a chef, it's like paying a doctor or any professional. You're paying for professional expertise," she says. "Let us feed you. We know how."
It hurts her, she says, to see someone scrape off the thick layer of exotic mushrooms in veal glace sauce from her meatloaf and then pour ketchup all over the meat. She likens it to how a mother feels when she slaves over dinner for her family, only to hear her kids refuse to try it and see her husband reach for the A-1 bottle before even picking up his fork.
What really sent her over the edge, however, was reading the occasional online bashing during Sietsema's chat directed toward fellow chef Carole Greenwood of Greenwood in Northwest Washington.
Greenwood has been adamant about not changing her cooking, no matter what people want. "Most chefs really love getting a dish right and when someone starts to dissect it, it's just demoralizing," she has said repeatedly. "Your work has to speak for itself." In many ways, she resembles the outspoken, but talented chef in the movie "Mostly Martha," although, fortunately, not in the way Martha dramatically ends a battle over rare meat with a particularly picky couple.
The latest Greenwood brouhaha discussed online had to do with a woman who was allergic to peanuts. The woman claimed she wanted a dessert that came with peanuts on top and asked for them to be left off. Greenwood declined, said the customer. The woman was outraged. Why, she fumed, couldn't the chef do this simple thing for her? Yes, she could have ordered another, peanut-free, dessert, but that wasn't the point.
Or was it?
To Clark, ordering something else certainly was the point. "Carole's got her way of how she wants her food and there is a rationale to her thinking." That dessert obviously was meant to have the flavor of peanuts. Or, perhaps, that dessert was partially prepared ahead of time and having to make a special one would disrupt the kitchen staff's timing. Either way, it doesn't really matter, Clark says. Have it the way the chef designed it, or have something else.
On the other hand, sometimes customers can get scolded for not making a special request.
My husband and I recently had lunch at Gramercy Tavern in New York, a large, top-rated restaurant run by superstar chef Tom Colicchio.
We had followed the waiter's advice in ordering and the food was fabulous. So when it came time for dessert and he touted the apple tart, we ordered that, too. I am lactose intolerant, so when the tart came topped with creme fraiche, I just scooped it off the tart and onto another plate. The waiter swooped down. "I guess creme fraiche isn't to your taste?" he asked. I explained my problem. "Well, why didn't you tell me?" he chided. "You should always mention any allergies or food dislikes. That gives the chef a chance to get creative and find a substitution." He rushed off and returned with a bowl of green apple sorbet. "This will give you another level of apple flavor," he explained. He watched, like a protective mother, as I took a bite.
Now Gramercy Tavern is not a small, neighborhood restaurant with a tiny kitchen and small staff. This kind of attention and accommodation is easier there than it is at places like Colorado Kitchen or Greenwood. Yet many chefs feel that whatever the size of the restaurant, the chef should do as much as reasonably possible to please the customers.
Susan Lindeborg, chef-owner of Majestic Cafe in Alexandria, and one of Clark's former bosses, says she likes Clark, "but I totally disagree with her point of view."
The restaurant business is a service industry, Lindeborg says, "and the service I provide is food. Anybody can have anything they want if I can reasonably do it without stopping the line or messing with the flow of the kitchen." She draws the line at making an entirely new dish, however, after one man begged her for something strictly low-fat because he was on a special diet. "When I came into the dining room to see if he had liked it, I saw him taking a big bite of a gooey dessert. That was the last time I made anyone a dish that's not on the menu."
She admits that people today are needy -- sometimes annoyingly so. "But food is a psychological thing. It's complicated. If a customer scrapes off stuff and is happy, then I'm happy." Besides, she points out, out of 120 dinners she serves on a typical night, only five or six have to be rearranged because of customer requests. "There's plenty of ego massaging from customers who eat it just as I designed it," she says.
Chefs can argue that they are artistes all they want, adds Persimmon's Damian Salvatore, but there's also the matter of economics. "It's too competitive out there not to accommodate customers, if you can," the Bethesda chef says. For those who want to rewrite an entire dish on his menu, Salvatore may say okay, but with a disclaimer. "I have the server tell them, 'We're happy to make the changes, but once it's changed, if you don't like it, you've bought it.' "
A clever server can also help dissuade customers from asking for changes in the first place, says Wolf. When a customer at one New York restaurant wanted to switch sauces on an entree, the waiter replied, "You know, the chef tried that, but it tasted like Windex."
At San Francisco's popular, always packed, Zuni Cafe, chef Judy Rodgers says she follows one golden rule when it comes to a customer-requested change: It can't delay someone else's order. If the cooks are slammed with a full house and the request is too complicated to do quickly, then the answer is no. Otherwise, "I don't care if someone wants ketchup on their chocolate cake. If it makes them happy, what's it to me?" she says.
Rodgers, whose "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook" recently won cookbook-of-the-year honors from the James Beard Foundation, has been in business almost 25 years. She says she always tells her servers, "People aren't coming to be told how to eat. You never tell them their taste is wrong. It's just their taste. Don't take it personally."
Perhaps the apex of have-it-your-way dining is at Colicchio's restaurant, Craft in New York City, which opened about a year ago. The menu offered food choices based on ingredients -- shellfish, poultry, vegetables, even sauces and condiments -- and customers basically built their meal themselves. You want this fish with that sauce and those potatoes? Fine.
Except a funny thing happened. People couldn't deal with all those choices. They were taking too long to decide, feeling too overwhelmed. So Colicchio recently modified the menu into main courses, first courses, sides, desserts. The kitchen decides which sauce or condiment will be used. And guess what?
"People still ask for things prepared a different way," says a restaurant employee. "We even had someone who wanted everything raw."
"Chefs Bite Back: In Some Cases, the Customer Isn't Always Right"
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