Service Culture
Indifference is more pleasant and mutually agreeable than enforced obsequiousness
I recently returned from Portugal and was once again reminded of key differences between European and American restaurant and café service. In the US, one could count the number of interactions, check-ins, and confirmations in dozens. The server’s role is to please and to sell, and the American marketing and bootstrap ideals make this a busy task foisted upon each dining group. Let’s get this out of the way before I make any more pejorative statements: none of the issues I describe are the fault of servers themselves. Restaurant management, restaurant consumers as a group, and the American entrepreneurish lemonade stand Win Friends and Influence People style are the culprits.
European restaurants and cafes, widely, are staffed in a far more indifferent, you’re welcome to be here but it doesn’t matter much to me kind of way. One talks to the wait staff perhaps 3 times, and the first and last time often take a little cajoling to initiate. You’re a guest in their space, but they are under no obligation to cater to you. It is fantastic. Perhaps it’s just me, but American restaurants often give me the creeps. I feel like I’m in a Stepford mansion, where smiling people under watchful management eyes are reciting scripts (and withering under the mandatory flair).
The European service ideal I’m describing also matches the way I’d like work to work. People doing what they need to do on their own emotional path, getting it done with whatever expression that day has brought. Bosses who need compliance in outcomes and interaction-styles bring out a type of apoplexy in me that I cannot contain. This is, of course, largely a result of my privilege to let my emotions out from time to time and know that the consequences will not include an inability to eat or find a new job. But no one should be denied this right to have the reactions and work style that exists for them, consumer and management preferences be damned.
There’s general lesson here about power and a specific one about human groups. If one “has” power, it means one is exerting it. There is no fence potential without barbed wire and posts. When an American consumer accepts the bows and scrapes in their restaurant culture, they show their sharpened teeth. There’s no escape from this reality within the environment that frames it. So, move to Europe or avoid these restaurant environments, perhaps? Or, to take a more ethically aligned route, take action to undo the structure that creates the barbed dynamic. This isn’t an essay with a schematic for doing so, just the groundhog-still-in-the-hole critique that hopes to lead others to barbed wire and post removal.
In smaller-than-society (and less-stuck-than-restaurant) human groups, I’m willing to make schematic structural change suggestions. In families, work teams, and relationships, one or two people have enough influence over the legislative, judicial, and executive power dynamics to craft more egalitarian situations. Give up your authority to individuals and the group if you have it. Take some if you don’t. Make experiments with non-representative, direct democracy to determine norms and expectations. And practice indifference to the styles and preferences of those who you interact with.