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So, I am a New Yorker and my husband is a Parisian. I look at Zagat and he, well, he doesn’t look at a guide really. He thinks we are all a little too fixated on who said what and on the peripheral matters, like who the architect of the restaurant was, or who eats there from time to time or how sexy the bartenders are. He is puzzled by the whole Zagat and Michelin debate because, from his perspective, the Michelin Guide is about gastronomie, in the French sense of the word, while the Zagat is a list of decent places with the phone number and address and some basic information. It is not about “gastronomie”. To him, there is no comparison to make because they are simply about different things.
The operative word here is the perception of what is considered “gastronomie”; a guide that is considered “gastronomique” will have a very specific audience and point of view, and a person who buys that guide will have a certain set of expectations.
There are restaurant guides to Paris that are not Michelin, like “Paris pas chère”, aimed at helping one to find a nice “resto” that isn’t high end but is good and priced right. There are also many web sites now, like oubouffer.com (also available in English), or restoaparis.com, which give a little insight into what Parisians are looking for when they go out to eat. The talk is almost always about the quality of the food and then the ambience and the price. But we often put more focus on the service staff than we do on the food. The service staff are there to perform and we are obliged to notice them, to make contact with them, to think of them as our equals. We never know when a Jennifer Garner will go from server to superstar.
At the end of the day, it’s apples and oranges. We look for what we look for, and in many ways service does come before food. It’s the service part that is the catch here, because Americans have a very different idea of the boundaries between patron and staff.
Case in point: One time, when I was in grad school, some new grad students from Belgium and Greece wanted to go out for a steak. We went to Outback, which at the time was a new-ish concept (in Cincinnati!) and also within our Grad Student budgets. The server came to our booth and sat down next to me, leaned on the table, and said, “Hi, I’m Chad. How are you?” Well, I was shocked, and asked him to please move away. But the newly arrived Grad students were completely flabbergasted and at first thought he was a friend of mine. This is an extreme case, but it points to something very elemental.
If we examine the restaurant commercials on television, we often see as much or more of the service staff than we do the food – not always true but often. We are pre-programmed to expect a welcoming face. When we don’t get one, or if we think that the staff is lazy, we often don’t return to the restaurant, or tell the manager, or write a letter, etc. I have, much to my husband’s horror, complained to a manager about a host who snapped her gum at me and said, “Can I help you with something?” And I retorted, “I am not shopping for shoes.” And I will never return to that restaurant because I remember her and her gum and that fact that the food wasn’t enough to make me want to return. There are so many other choices. Why should I put up with that kind of attitude?
Tags:
attitude, michelin, paris, zagat
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Posted on 10/29/2005
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