Why are we being hustled out of restaurants?

By Ed Goldman

I’ve also observed that lately, food seems to arrive at my table with record-busting velocity, as though I’m a cranky toddler who’ll begin pounding my pacifier on the table any second.

Or maybe there’s an in-house competition going on among the cooks, waiters and bus staff: The first to get these malingerers out the door will win an all-expense-paid trip back to their apartments. 

Perhaps there’s a new unspoken motto about alacrity being a virtue: “The customer is always done.”

In the pre-COVID past, the managers of busy restaurants had a quota of tables they hoped to “turn over” in the course of an evening. It may even have come in the form of an edict from the owners: Thou shalt schedule seatings for 5, 6:30 and 8 p.m.

At diners, of course, these 90-minute seatings are doubled or even trebled—unless in the case of a big group, such as a team whose members (Earl, Doris, Midge and Hank) just won a business-to-business bowling competition. Conversely, if the group consists of as many as 17 eight-year-old soccer players, you can pretty much expect the ordering will still take far longer than the consuming of 17 servings of burgers, fries and malts. Experience has taught me that kids at that age are incapable of sitting still for more than about 25 minutes without successive screenings of “Frozen” and its sequels—or pharmaceuticals, natch.

I’ve felt this rush-to-nourishment most keenly while enjoying a pre-prandial martini. 

If I order a second one, a diligent server will start removing my current one, even if insufficiently drained (the martini, not the server). I realize, from having marketed a few restaurants—in another, far more lucrative segment of my ill-lusterless career—that the serious dough for a full-bar restaurant derives from that full bar. As the owner of a fairly upscale restaurant told me, “We just break even on the food. The profit margin comes from the sale of booze.” 

This certainly echoes the findings of my own forays into financial literacy.

A big bottle of vodka may cost me anywhere from $17 (at Rite-Aid) to $26 (at Corti Brothers, a pricey independent market that’s been a Sacramento landmark since 1947). 

But at a restaurant, a drink made from even one tenth of a bottle’s contents can range from $5 (at a neighborhood watering hole) to $16 (at an airport lounge, since there’s no competition—unless I opt to substitute the sugar intake from alcohol with that derived from a Cinnabon). 

At home, by contrast, each martini costs me from about $1.50 to $2. Granted, there’s no piano bar in my condo. But I do have a piano and I do have a radio, and I’ve become surprisingly adept at playing the radio.