So I just checked, and there are, in fact, still fancy restaurants. Despite today’s food prices.
I don’t actually enjoy fancy restaurants. I only go to fancy restaurants when I’m out somewhere and that’s all they have, and I’m like, “Well at least it’s kosher.”
But my wife and I went to a fancy restaurant recently, because we were in Manhattan for a trade show for my wife’s kitchen-design business, and my main condition in coming along was that we would go out to eat afterwards. And the only restaurants on our way back to the bus were fancy restaurants, so I said, “Uch, fine.”
You can tell right away when a restaurant is trying to be fancy. They all have a certain ambiance in the form of not turning their lights on all the way. I’m not sure how they clean the place.
“For this amount of money, they can’t afford lightbulbs?”
They can afford lightbulbs. The idea of dim lighting is that you know how when you go to a place that’s not so fancy, you can see cracks in the wall and stains on the silverware? In a fancy restaurant, you don’t see any of that—because of the lighting. And also because of the random paraphernalia hanging on the wall. You think it’s there to be a conversation piece for the 45 minutes you wait to get your food (“Why do you suppose they hung a giant wine barrel?”) but it’s actually covering an electrical panel.
The reason it takes that long to get your food, obviously, is that the food is super fresh. You order a steak, and they say, “Great!” and they take it out of the freezer to start thawing. Or they send someone out to go buy it from the supermarket.
But in the meantime, they give you free bread to eat while you wait, plus something to dip it into such as straight olive oil. Just a bowl of olive oil.
I think it was olive oil. It could have been canola; I don’t know.
Because sometimes I’m eating bread and I’m like, “This bread is not oily enough. Can we get some oil in with these carbs?”
Does the olive oil make it taste better? It’s plain oil. But they give you oil, and that’s fancy, so you’re eating it. You didn’t know it was fancy. But you’re in a fancy restaurant, and they’re serving it, so now you know. You’re getting your cues on what’s fancy. And now when you have guests at home that you’re looking to impress, you’re going to break out the plain olive oil.
And you might as well eat the bread, because it’s free. Whereas the water, at least where we went, was ten bucks.
We didn’t know this up front. The waitress asked, “Do you want sparkling water or still water?”
They called it “still water” because that makes it fancy. “It’s not tap water, it’s still water.” But I mean, all water comes from a tap at some point. What water doesn’t come from the tap? Are they running back and forth to the river? Is this mikvah water? Do they have a keilim mikvah and also they fill pitchers from it?
So we figured, “We’re paying a lot for the food; we’re not going to pay 5 bucks so they can pour a can of Coke into a glass for us. Let’s get the water.” So my wife ordered sparkling water, and I ordered still water, and they brought us two clear, glass, open-topped bottles—about a liter each—with no labels, and we had to figure out which was which the hard way, but I mean we did have 45 minutes.
I think still water is sparkling water that has been left open for too long.
And then after the meal, I checked the bill to see if they’d included the tip, and I noticed that we’d been charged $20 for our waters.
And then I said, “How much do we tip her?” and my wife said, “Who? This woman who didn’t tell us that the water was more expensive than the soda?”
Then we discussed whether we should tell her to wrap up the rest of the water to go, seeing how much we’d paid for it.
At home, we get most of our drinking water from Costco, and if we want to buy $20 worth of water bottles, it comes out to 27 gallons of water. This was not 27 gallons of water. But it was fancy water, like better than any other water we’ve ever tasted.
We were trying to manage our expenses in the first place. We were there for a late lunch, and we’d ordered the prix fixe meal, which was not cheap, but the price was fixed, so we figured that way there’d be no surprises, other than the $20 worth of water.
A prix fixe is a predetermined sampler menu where you pay a blanket fee for a 3-course meal, and there are 3 choices per course: There’s the item you both want, the item you’re both okay with getting if the other one wants the item you both want, and the item you can’t imagine that anyone gets.
Another benefit of the prix fixe is that you don’t have to deal with sorting through the whole 7-page menu in a restaurant you’ve never been to. Because normally, they give you this menu, and then they come over to you every three minutes to ask if you’ve finished reading it yet, and you’re like, “Not yet. I read slower in the dark.”
“Most customers use the light of their phone.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
She’s really earning her tip.
And then as soon as you order, they immediately collect the menus so you have nothing to peruse while you wait for your food.
I don’t know why restaurants take away the menu after you order. They should let you keep it, because otherwise you’re wondering, “What is in this sauce?”
“I don’t remember. Is this what you ordered?”
“I don’t know; it was an hour ago.”
What, do they not have enough menus for the room?
And if you can look back and see what it was, you know what to order the next time you come. Because that’s how most people deal with restaurants. There’s a local eatery that my wife and I order from periodically, and most of the time, we order the same two things. I always look through the menu for something different, and then I order the same two things again. One time I decided, “You know what? I’m definitely ordering something new!” So I called the order in, and they said, “Actually, we’re out of this new thing,” and I said, “Uh…” and I ordered something else spur of the moment that wasn’t nearly as good as the thing we usually get.
And then you have to go to the back of the restaurant to wash—way beyond the nice part of the restaurant—until you find some small sink in a corner near the bathrooms under a hanging towel. In a wedding hall, they have the sinks near the front, so you can wash when you come in. In a restaurant it’s in the back, further back than the kitchens. There’s an entirely different ambiance back there.
“Is this where we wash?”
It must be. There’s a basket of bread pieces that the kitchen staff is going to feed the ducks later. There’s no way the restaurant made this bread. It tastes nothing like the stuff on the tables, and where’s the bowl of olive oil? Oh, wait…! No, that wasn’t oil.
And the washing cup is chained to the sink, like pens at a bank. Who’s going to the back of a restaurant to wash and then stealing the washing cup? They’re not chaining down the silverware. Are you going to now go back through the whole crowded restaurant with a washing cup under your shirt? And it’s not like you’re leaving! You’re just starting your meal. What’s the plan? Are you just going to set it down next to you on the table, and see if you can taste the difference between the so-called “still water” and whatever you collected in the washing cup?
Maybe that’s what they don’t want.
So overall, I’m still not sold on fancy restaurants. Though I’m probably doing it wrong.
Is the food better, at least? I don’t know. In the restaurant I usually go to, I always get the same two things.
But what I did gain, maybe, is some tips on how to make your Shabbos seudah guests feel like your house is super fancy for basically no money at all:
• Put out a bowl of olive oil with the challah.
• Be really cheap with the lights
• Offer them “still water.”
• Don’t tell them where to wash; just direct them vaguely toward your most out-of-the-way sink.
• Tie down your washing cups.
• After Shabbos, send them a bill for the still water.
Doing all this will definitely impress your guests enough to have them come back about as often as we come back to fancy restaurants.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.
