We’ve talked about reservations before.

This is a refresher course.

About three weeks ago I had a message on the machine requesting a large party reservation.

I called them back.

Turns out they were a local car dealership looking for a place to host an employee gathering.

Great. I’d be glad to help.

They’ll be 14 people.

We have a steadfast policy that the most people we can do in one seating is 12 people.

Every restaurant has their maximum.

For us it’s 12. For several reasons.

We’ve established that any more than 12 slows down the kitchen way too much.

When your average restaurant plans a menu they make sure their items are spread between multiple cooking stations.

Ovens get 6 items. Sauté gets 6 items. Salads get 6 items. Fry 6 items. No one person cooks it all.

When you are a steakhouse. The grill has 16,452 items. Salad has 3.

There truly is a limit to how many steaks we can cook at one time.

And for us. With the rest of the restaurant cranking, 12 is our max table.

The other reason we restrict seating, is that our semi private dining rooms max out at 12. So we can only put 12 people at one table. If I seat 14 we are seating two 7 tops and it’s better for revenue to seat two 12’s not two
7’s.

Long way of saying I told him we couldn’t accommodate him.

He asked what the most we could do was.

I said 12.

He decided to make the reservation for 12 and said he’d figure it out.

And how did he figure it out?

Last night when the party arrived we didn’t count them. There were just a lot of people in our lobby

So we get their table ready. I send them off.

And 30 seconds later the food runner who sat them is back to inform me that they don’t have enough chairs.

Because how many people showed up?

14.

I’m annoyed.

I follow her back to the table.

Where I explain that the table can only comfortably seat 12. No they can’t spread to the table next to them.

The food runner gets two chairs.

I leave.

They end up squishing.

13 of them were annoyed. The only person who was remotely nice about it was the guy who made the reservation.

He also paid the check which was good for the server.

But seriously. Who does that?