It is our most precious resource, the lifeblood of civilization. In bottle form, it is a $12 billion industry. In its natural state–falling from the sky or melting from snow-covered mountains–it has become the stuff of myth. The piddling amounts we have in reservoirs remind us that, here in Los Angeles, we live in a desert. What we don’t bring to town in trucks, ships and cargo planes, we hijack from the Colorado River. We dedicate some of our best and brightest minds to figuring out new ways to harness it, whether through desalination or treating sewage (okay, gross). And still, with all the attention lavished upon drinking water, we can’t seem to figure out how to serve it in a restaurant.
Here comes trouble.
Lately it seems restaurants have eased off the hard-sell of pricey bottled water, but there are still plenty of places that offer up the annoying, “Flat or sparkling,” option and force the customer to guiltily confess, “No, regular water is fine,” as if we’d just agreed to bury a loved one in a pine box instead of a $12,000 silk-lined, pewter torpedo. The push toward all things green has made us conscious of those plastic bottles filling up our landfills, and removed the stigma from good old municipal (albeit filtered) water. Indeed, tap water is cool again, and that’s as it should be. As long as it doesn’t taste like rusty pipes, or the swimming pool at the local Y, I’m happy.
But there is a right way and a wrong way to serve iced water. Simply put, a water glass should be lifted off the table and refilled over the floor, not over the table. I can only begin to describe my annoyance when a server sticks a wet, dripping pitcher in front of my face and fills up my glass wherever it may sit on the table. Invariably, there is splashing, whether on my body or, more egregious, on my food. I’m completely baffled by the thinking here. As best I can figure, the sentiment must be that customers don’t want a glass they are using touched by an employee during a meal. Fair enough, but I’m not suggesting a server stick her thumb in it. No, a glass is picked up at the base, or if it’s a wine glass, from the bottom of the stem. As for coffee mugs, there’s a handle there. Best to use it.
I was a busboy for years, much longer than I was a waiter. Those hard-working men (they tend to be male) are my brothers. Yet when it comes to refilling water, they are simple doing what they’ve been told to do. The way a server handles or doesn’t handle a water glass is a decision made by management, not buy the people who do the pouring. Either a restaurant opts for the slightly more time-consuming, infinitely preferable method of picking a glass up off the table, or it goes for the splashy-splash method of whisking a cold, wet pitcher past your ear like a spawning salmon. It’s one way or the other, never both.
The worst offenders are the guys I call the Two-fisted Charlies, the guys with a pitcher in each hand, usually one for iced tea and one for water. With no free hand to pick up your glass, you can almost bank on a face-full of pitcher. These guys are all about speed–two hands, two pitchers, twice as efficient. And twice as messy. By the time they’re gone, the table is wetter than the tile floor beneath a stadium urinal.
Trying to counteract this from the customer side is something I’ve never successfully managed. When a particularly inaccurate pourer approaches my glass, I try to beat him to the punch by picking up the glass and handing it to him. Usually this act is met with confusion, as they often think I’m asking them to take it away. Or sometimes we end up doing this awkward bit of physical comedy as I hold the glass for him while he pours, which is something neither of us are comfortable with, and the splash results are worse than if I’d just taken my licks and let him do it his way.
Trying to explain what I want gets me no where. My Spanish sucks, and when I say it in English I sound like an assshole who’s giving an employee a hard time for doing his job. But on those few occasions when I effectively explain that I would like the gentlemen to please fill my glass away from the table and then replace it, he looks at me with a disbelieving stare that says, “Why on Earth would you want that?” It’s as if they’ve been conditioned to think they should never touch anything.
For those diners who agree with the prevailing idea that a busser shouldn’t touch one’s water glass during a meal for hygienic reasons, I’ve got news for you. Employees have already touched every single item near you: your plates, your silverware, and even your food, all with their bare hands. In fact, cooks touch your food all the time. And you’re still alive. So get over it. Those hands you think are riddled with Ebola viruses and staph infections are the same hands that have refolded your napkin when you were in the john. Anybody pouting over that one? No.
Once or twice, there’s has been enough water dribbled onto my food that I’ve asked to have it remade. Sorry, but a $40 New York steak, perfectly garnished with garlic butter, doesn’t need a bracing splash of cold tap water to top it off.
The other problem with filling glasses this way is that it’s pretty damn difficult to do it in a controlled manner. The varying weight of the pitcher with its fluctuating center of gravity, the cagey positioning of the glasses around the table–I’ve been know to obscure mine behind the floral arrangement just to get my passive-aggressive point across–and clunking mass of ice in the pitcher that just seems to throw off everything all conspire to make pouring water right onto the table a disaster waiting to happen. And let’s not even discuss the dangers of filling up coffee cups this way. If a restaurant is going out of its way to use a long-spouted pitcher, then ok. But those glass carafes like the ones homeboy is holding in the picture above are not meant for precision pouring.
Some restaurants get cutesy by wrapping the pitchers in an elaborate origami of linen napkins to minimize the drips from condensation. Great, now the spawning salmon is wearing a topcoat. It’s a band-aid, not a solution.
The real solution–start picking the glasses up by hand, refilling them off the table and setting them back down hygienically and unobtrusively–is not only doable, but far easier. The sooner restaurants start conditioning themselves to do this, the sooner they’ll learn that the backlash they thought they’d get from costumers is a bigger myth than an August thundershower in Hollywood.
Photo courtesy of the Continental Restaurant, Buffalo Grove, Il, where, to be fair, no one has ever splashed water on me.
Posted by Aaron Black at 6:19 PM