GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Intentional hospitality can be sublime, if guests and servers both do their part.

- John T. Edge

TWO DECADES HAVE PASSED since I put down a happy hour cocktail to step outside BrickTop’s, a clubhouse in Nashville with caramel leather booths and a proper French dip. The call coming in on my cell was urgent. I still tell the story of our bartender that day. Seeing the distress on my face, knowing I didn’t want to leave that martini behind, she tucked my glass into a bucket of ice to await my return.

I can’t recall the name of that server. But I can tell you that a few years earlier, near the close of a dinner at Bacchanalia in Atlanta, a manager—James Quinones—noticed that I liked to eat buttons of chèvre on baguette heels. When it came time to replenish the bread, he brought an entire basket of heels. Years later, reading his obituary, I learned from co-owner Anne Quatrano that Quinones always arranged bouquets of sunflowers at the restaurants where he served. He turned their nodding heads toward the door at the beginning of service, then toward the dining room when it came time to bid goodnight.

Hospitality depends on observation and empathy and the promise of delight. As our American relationship with restaurants matures, that calculus matters more than ever. Over the past generation, the practice of enlightened hospitality, born of restaurateur Danny Meyer’s put-employees-first ethos, and the later idea of unreasonable hospitality (going far above and beyond customer expectations), espoused by restaurateur Will Guidara, have introduced customers to heightened expectations and restaurant staff to new responsibilities.