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THE RELUCTANT GOURMET

Much obliged, waiter It’s the small gestures that make a dinner memorable

Dining is about the whole experience, but mainly the service. Which is why you would probably go back to a place with average food, but fabulous service. While even a good dinner served by rude or snooty waiters leaves you feeling so dreadful, you’ll not only never repeat the restaurant but also discourage anyone you know from ever going there.

After all, people primarily eat out to feel good. Restaurants are for celebrations: birthdays, anniversaries, family get-togethers. Restaurants are for highly charged, important meetings: first dates, the modern arranged marriage boy-meets-girl scenario, reunions. And restaurants are for crucial business: deals, interviews, plans.

In the midst of all these important conversations, whether they’re emotional or practical, naturally, the service your table gets plays a significant part in the proceedings, and can even influence the outcome. After all how pleasant can a date be if the waiter talks down to your boyfriend, or a reunion if the service is boorish.

Chennai unfortunately has some places with truly dreadful service. There’s the popular nightclub with bouncers who are so rude and obnoxious that there’s a growing list of people boycotting the place. There’s the expensive ice-cream parlour with frustratingly languid waiters who clearly have more important things on their mind than serving customers. And then there’s the new yuppie breed of pushy restaurants, which train their staff to sneak in frills you don’t want, just to inflate your bill.

However, as most smart restaurateurs are learning, Chennai’s public is consistently practical. Being ‘hip and happening’ is not really enough to retain customers, after the first six months, no matter how excitedly they swarm a restaurant when it begins. Ultimately it sinks or swims depending on its food, prices and most importantly – its service. After all, when you leave a restaurant feeling ripped off, no matter how good the food, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth for an astonishingly long time.

Which explains why Mainland China is still one of Chennai’s most popular restaurants. The waiters are friendly, polite and sensible, helping diners choose their meals, keeping in mind budgets and portion sizes. When most other places get annoyed with large crowds of perpetually broke college kids crowding their tables, the Fruit Shop On Greams Road always encouraged them. The result? According to the owner Harris, even five and ten years later, they come back — as U.S. based investment bankers, IT professionals from Silicon Valley — rich, successful and bring friends. And this time they spend.

Most of the smaller city restaurants actually have great service. There’s crowded Annapoorna, a Bengali restaurant, where waiters fuss over you worriedly if you don’t eat enough.

Woodlands Drive-In where waiters remember how much sugar each of their regular customers takes in his/her coffee. Boisterous Chettinad joints, where waiters cluck over women protectively. Local teas shops, where owners lovingly dust their sole stool for you if you feel like sitting down.

It’s the ‘small gestures’ that make a dinner memorable. When I was five I dropped an ice-cream and the ice-cream man patted my head and handed me another. It cost him very little. But I remember the gesture decades later. That’s the kind of impact a thoughtful gesture can have.

A friend of mine recently knocked over her icy Mojito at Distil, at Taj Connemara, as soon as she got it and the waiter quietly replaced it, and didn’t charge her. It’s now her favourite place in town.

Women’s night there is also packed, thanks in part to their doorman-bouncer Shankar, who hands out gifts and grins like an especially benevolent Santa Claus. When 601 at The Park opened, their Executive Chef Willi, walked around the restaurant chatting with guests, a tradition now continued by his team. It’s become one of the city’s most popular coffee-shops.

Sparky’s, the American diner, has Chef Thom Petty, who’s on such back-slapping terms with most of his regulars, they even have a poker-night tradition now.

What makes a restaurant stand out? There’s no magic formula. Basically, restaurants that are special to customers are restaurants that make customers feel special.

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