ELECTRONIC HOUSE CALL - August 16, 2002

TAKE OUT, EAT IN
I recently received this note from a harried restaurant manager:
As a veteran of some 25 years in the business I am curious to know how you would encourage operators to respond to the following situation. Five guests come into my restaurant during a busy lunch in the middle of summer. Two teenagers and three adults. The table is seated and the teens pull food from my competitor down the waterfront out of a bag and start to eat. The three adults plan on ordering off my menu. Both items the teens are eating (hamburger and Caesar salad) are available on my menu. Each time I think I have the right answer to this dilemma I invariably end up pissing off the guest. How would you handle this situation?

A Note from the Doc:
As a start, if you piss off a guest (who was not PO'd before you started), you can be sure that what looked like the right answer for YOU did not look like a right answer to THEM. If we are really in the people-pleasing business (and we are!) the job isn't about not pissing them off, it's about making sure they are delighted! There are a couple of things going on here. One thing you might want to find out is why these folks preferred the burgers and salad from your competitor! The other, of course, is what to do about people who bring in food from outside.

I find it interesting that you used the word dilemma to describe what happened. Is the situation you describe really a dilemma ... or are you just making your life harder by laying down a lot of rules? Granted, it is a disruption of the routine when you are slammed and you really don't know how long the other food has been in the bag or how it has been handled before they arrived. If the teens get sick on a meal that you did not prepare but which was consumed on your premises, could you be liable? What sort of documentation would you need to have a defensible position if a suit was brought against you? Do you really know the answers to these questions?

If you don't have those answers, your first step has to be to check with the Health Department, your insurance carrier and perhaps your legal counsel to know if you have any potential liability and if so, where and what it might be. Once you know where you stand, there are three possibilities

The first possibility is that you have no potential liability, in which case the simplest approach is to be grateful for the three adult meals and let the rest of it go. If you think their "brown bagging" might be creating issues for you with the other guests, take the bags into the kitchen, put the contraband meals on plates and serve them with the adults meals. Letting them do what they want to do is certainly the path of least resistance and the one most likely to delight the guests. It can be a hard pill to swallow, but don't get all in a lather about it. You have more important things to worry about.

When you get upset, it will affect the mood in the entire restaurant which will, in turn, impact your staff and all the guests negatively -- definitely not in your best interests. I call it "tone" ... and while you can't see it, tone is very tangible. For example, did you ever go over to another couple's house and they had a fight just before you walked in the door? Couldn't you tell? Of course you could ... not from anything that they said ... not from anything you could see ... but you could feel it, couldn't you? Didn't you find the feeling uncomfortable? It is just the same in the restaurant. Your guests can feel when there has been an upset ... and it is as uncomfortable for them as being in your friend's house was for you. People don't go back to where they feel uncomfortable, so if there is really no issue, cut everybody -- yourself included -- some slack and take the easy way out.

The second possibility is that you don't have any real liability but as a matter of principle, you just don't want folks eating someone else's food in your place. If you adopt this position, recognize that it's just an ego thing. Ego is just when you think that what is important to you takes precedence over what is important to somebody else and that can be dangerous in a service business. However, if you are adamant -- or if so many people are brown-bagging it that your volume is suffering (but that's not really happening, is it?) -- you had best establish a written policy about it. [As an aside, I encourage you to have as few policies as possible. Mostly they just ways to say no to a guest and that will get you in trouble sooner or later.]

If you are still bent on having your way, thank the guests for coming in and explain that you do not permit food that was prepared elsewhere to be consumed in the restaurant. They will probably ask why, at which point you can truthfully say is that it is a policy the owner has established (even if you are actually the owner, it is less dangerous to make a third party the villain) and you have no choice but to enforce it. Remember that your issues are not their issues, so avoid taking a position where they can debate you and don't ever try to con them. When you lie to a guest, they can sense that you are not being truthful and the situation will only get worse. I would tell them there are two ways you could make this work for themIf they would still like to eat with you, offer to put their contraband into the cooler until they leave. If they would prefer to eat the food they brought, offer to pack up the adults' meals to go and suggest a place where they could have an impromptu picnic together. I would toss in a few free cookies as an unexpected surprise.

The third possibility is that you could have some liability. If this is the case, you really have no choice. Tell them, in an apologetic and sincere tone of voice, that you appreciate their coming in and that you would like nothing better than to let them eat the food they brought. However, your health department license and your insurance carrier (third parties again) will not permit any food to be consumed on the premises that was not actually prepared on the premises. Then proceed as suggested above -- offer to put their contraband into the cooler until they leave or offer to pack up the adults meals to go.

In general, always look for a way to say "yes" rather than have to tell a guest "no." If you can't say yes to all of it, say yes to as much as you can or tell them under what circumstances you can say yes. You can see that only the first approach is an unqualified yes. As such, it runs no risk of pissing off the guests. In both of the other scenarios, you have to get them to do something they don't want to do -- it a "yes but under these conditions" -- and that is always fraught with more peril, particularly if the guests feel you are talking down to them.

However, done with sensitivity and sincerity, the approaches I have outlined should work most of the time. No matter how skillful you are, though, the law of averages says that you will not win them all. If a guest gets upset, do the best you can at that moment, clean up the mess and get on with your life. Life is too short (and too precious) to spend any of it feeling upset.

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