Saturday night, I was good and ready for dinner beyond what-to-put-on-pasta. Jo and I ended up with lamb chops from the new food-movement-friendly butcher shop in Chelsea Market. Humane treatment (or as humane as killing an animal for deliciousness can ever be) plus a frou-frou cut meant over $20 for barely enough meat for two. Which is to say, it will be a while till we do that again, but it was plenty delicious,* it was still less for two, even given additional ingredients, than an equivalent meal would be for one at just about any restaurant. I know this because I never dare order such a dish at a restaurant, certainly not along with a glass of wine and a cheese-involving salad, because this whole meal would cost... I don't even want to think about it. And the quality of each ingredient was, hands-down, far superior to anything a restaurant even remotely in my price range might provide. Restaurants promising menus rooted in market produce tend to go beyond even a grad-student splurge. Whereas occasional fancy-ingredient home-cooked meals are very much doable.
So far, all I've given an account of is the obvious: it's cheaper to cook than to eat out. Yet restaurants exist, presumably for reasons beyond some people's need to throw money away. Granted, certain contexts call for a non-home environment - a second date, a business lunch, any meal consumed by someone who lives with many kitchen-hogging roommates. And depending what you're used to cooking, some cuisines will remain permanently beyond your repertoire, either for lack of knowledge regarding 'secret ingredients' or for lack of a necessary skill or cooking tool. (If I had a pizza stone, a tandoori oven, the ability to roll sushi and have it come out looking like sushi...). But restaurants typically offer versions of what we could all easily make at home ("arugula, pear, and Gorgonzola salad, $9'), and what those of us with dishwashers can easily enough clean up from.
To enjoy dining out, you need to consider it a plus, rather than a drawback, that food is prepared by someone other than yourself, and that a perfect stranger, rather than you or your dining companion, fetches each dish for you from the kitchen. Despite the hundreds of comments here and here from waitstaff along the lines of 'we're not your servants', dining out is, even for the respectful, non-obnoxious customer, about being served. Otherwise, why would restaurants even offer basic salads, ice cream bowls, and other items simple to prepare for yourself? A diner should, of course, treat staff with respect and follow the local tipping standards. But a customer who followed this advice and spent each meal out feeling grateful not to be too poor to dine out somewhere fancy, and thinking how tough - no, almost tragic - it must be to be a waiter (i.e. reacting to restaurants as Larry David does to chauffeured cars in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), could not possibly enjoy the meal. While my past experience in food service (limited) and other fetching-stuff-type work (more extensive), along with my current salary, prevent me from feeling the requisite rich-yuppie guilt on the rare occasions I find myself in a restaurant, I still, for whatever reason, find someone making me food I could easily make myself, and someone else handing me that food, more of a negative experience, all things equal, than a positive one,** and certainly not worth spending too much of my earnings on. I like the variety restaurants permit, and the possibility of inspiration for home-cooked meals to come, but do not think that if I earned more, I'd be spending much more at all on restaurant dining.
So, fellow cheapskates, is eating out worth the price?
*I have also discovered that everything, absolutely everything, or at the very least, fish and meat, tastes better after first being marinated in a mix of rosemary, garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Jo just made a sarcastic remark about me putting this next on pasta, but I think he might be onto something...
**This could, again, have something to do with the fact that when I say "restaurants," I mean real restaurants, which I have been to, but am also on some level picturing the sort of places I go to more often, where grad students might go to splurge - this means places where the one waitress speaks ill of each set of customers as they leave, to the one person making the food, in the main dining area, because the food-prep and dining areas combined are four square feet, or a certain spot in Chinatown where a paper napkin I'd blown my nose in and was about to take to a trashcan outside was quickly snatched by a waitress who proceeded to use said napkin to 'clean' the table for the next customers. Who knows.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
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19 comments:
I frequently buy fancy (but <$8) sandwiches which I think are worth it because even though they're easy to make, all the necessary ingredients come in packages too big for just one sandwich, and too unpickled to last the time it would take me to make a second. (How often do you have both pears and Gorgonzola stocked in your fridge?) Also, when coffee and sandwiches (and Old Navy sales) are practically the only things you spend money on, it's hard to feel guilty about them.
However, and maybe this warrants its own post, when you spend your entire life looking for "hidden gem" type restaurants (read: cheap) and then you decide to get married, you may encounter some difficulties thinking of acceptable wedding venues due to this limited repertoire. Unfortunately, it turns out that Harold's Chicken and The Snail don't do weddings.
Oh, I agree re: the efficiencies of the sub-$8 lunch, as opposed to packing a lunch in a bag already stuffed with library books. But dining out? There's where I'm not sure.
And no, I don't think it's unfortunate that the Snail doesn't do weddings. But I agree with the spirit of the sentiment.
Ha, I suspect I got my pork belly the weekend before this past one from that selfsame Chelsea Market hipster butcher. He had my number: asked if I was going to be making pork buns, and when I admitted that I was, launched into a rehearsed-by-multiple-shows-before-Momofuku-cookbook-toting-audiences explanation about pig skin, pig hair and brining.
The pork buns may have been cost-efficient if you look only at ingredients -- $18 of meat, $3 of Chinatown steam buns, $5 in assorted vegetables, salt, sugar, and hoisin sauce, to produce 12 pork buns that would cost 3 times as much at the restaurant. However, the cost in time (to go to Chelsea for the meat, Chinatown for the buns, even the fairly small prep time of the meal itself -- about 1/2 hour) seems much heavier.
I like the feeling of accomplishment from cooking (and from doing certain other things for myself; sending out laundry, for example, seems insanely arrogant and extravagant). But my husband sees the whole point of billable hours as making extremely clear just what one's time is worth, and unless we are producing something worth $200 with each hour devoted to homely tasks, it's not efficient. I should be working on the $200 an hour work (although I can't take that seriously because it's not the amount *I'm* getting paid), or enjoying my leisure. To me, cooking constitutes a form of leisure -- one often can't tell from the amount of cursing going on, but I enjoy doing it. Since we routinely substitute the results of that leisure through the market, however, it's not as clearly leisure as watching TV or surfing the internet.
(Do people still say "surfing the internet"? It seems like such an Al Gore-ish phrase but I haven't heard of an alternative.)
It occurs to me that I'm in a kind of reverse feminist dilemma -- where women once had to fight to have domestic work recognized *as work*, and work that could be outsourced to the market because it didn't have to be done by the loving hand of WifeMother, I'm now arguing for domestic work as a form of leisure.
In terms of food, I agree. There's a lot of mediocre food out there that anyone who has a modicum of cooking ability or experience can prepare as well or better, and it seems like a huge rip to be paying through the nose for a scoop of ice cream, or what have you. Breakfasts always seem the worst, because whenever I'm out I always wonder why am I paying someone to fry me an egg and make toast, since that's what I make for myself at home half the time. Since I only eat out cheaply, I prefer ethnic restaurants, because I am less likely or capable of preparing such foods at home, and also the prices are very cheap. A great restaurant can really provide food that is worth the mark up, but probably 90% are places that serve food anyone who spent time learning the basics of cooking could prepare themselves, and this is true at all price points.
In terms of being waited on, I generally find if you are polite to your server they will be polite back without much anxiety on either parts, but I find tipping and eating in a group causes me lots of anxiety. I personally hate the concept of tipping, and if I could abolish it tomorrow, I would. If restaurants would raise prices 15-20% and also raise server's salaries, I would be so much happier about eating out. I hate too how tips are slowly creeping upwards, (over the past fifteen years it's gone from 10%, to 15%, and now it's edging towards 20% as the minimum and if you don't like paying ever more of your server's salary, then you are made to feel like a complete asshole). Also, tipping is creeping into more and more things, and suddenly you have to feel guilty for not tipping the person selling bread at the bakery, etc. I actually avoid ordering takeout because I don't know the tipping etiquette for picking up the food yourself. On the one hand, if you are actually going to the restaurant to pick of food, then who the hell would you be tipping, because you are waiting on yourself. But on the other hand, being at a restaurant and not leaving a tip seems...well, wrong, and leaving a really small tip also seems insulting.
What can also produce anxiety is eating out in groups, especially when tip and tax are involved, because there's always someone who is "bad at math" or who "forgets" about the 10% sales tax, etc. Plus, you always have to round up not to look like a chump, and often end up putting in an extra dollar or two, which is fine a few times, but gets really irritating every time (even an extra dollar adds up if you eat out frequently). It's even worse when people order lots of drinks or appetizers etc, and then no one can figure out what they owe anyways, and American establishments are weirdly averse to separate checks, even though it should not be that hard.
Finally, to end out my long rant, I do get annoyed by all those, "you should tip 50% because waiting sucks and I deserve to make more money" articles really irritating. I've worked in customer service (retail, no tipping) and the food industry (barista/cafe, tipped peanuts). Even though I was preparing coffee, food, AND serving people, there was no requirement to tip. Yeah, the work was hard, and there were some really rude customers. But you know what? It was my job to be polite and pleasant no matter what, and if I thought it sucked that much, then I would have found a different job. Even though I was chef AND waiter, I didn't see a tip as my God-given right, but rather as a pleasant extra (I got paid minimum wage). Sure, I appreciated the people who put 2$ (or even $.25) in the tip jar for a coffee, but I didn't look daggers at the people who didn't tip, because it ISN'T mandatory, and not everyone has that kind of money. At a restaurant, beyond the 15% tip that the IRS assumes, anything is extra, and if people don't feel like giving you more money, then too fricking bad.
Sorry, that's a fairly bitter rant, but just recently I've read too many of those, "my waiting on you is an honor you should respect and pay dearly for" which rubs me the wrong way.
PG,
I think prepared foods generally (the $6 sandwich, the pork bun, food ordered in, etc.) are a different issue from restaurants, because there, convenience really is the issue, and might on its own make up for inferior ingredients. The pleasure of being served, the theatricality of it, is not.
Britta,
"I would. If restaurants would raise prices 15-20% and also raise server's salaries, I would be so much happier about eating out."
Agreed, for sure. The awkwardness of the tip comes from the fact that it's mandatory and optional at the same time - the management leaves it up to you to decide if the staff gets paid, so as to give the illusion of lower prices.
My sense of barista work, from both the customer and barista side of it, is that it tends to attract people who get off on insulting customers, either explicitly or via nasty looks and whispered comments about everyone who dares enter a coffee bar specializing in fancy drinks to order a fancy drink. If you find it tragic that someone would ask you to make them a half-decaf soy latte, why not try one of the many, many jobs where this request would be irrelevant? I seriously do think part of why I didn't stay with that line of work longer was that I didn't think people were ridiculous for ordering anything other than a black coffee at a place specializing in drinks that are not black coffee. There will sometime be a post analyzing the coffee-bar experience in full...
Also, tipping is creeping into more and more things, and suddenly you have to feel guilty for not tipping the person selling bread at the bakery, etc. I actually avoid ordering takeout because I don't know the tipping etiquette for picking up the food yourself. On the one hand, if you are actually going to the restaurant to pick of food, then who the hell would you be tipping, because you are waiting on yourself. But on the other hand, being at a restaurant and not leaving a tip seems...well, wrong, and leaving a really small tip also seems insulting.
I'm beginning to get a sense of anxiety from reading Phoeobe's posts and the comments on them. I find at WWPD that when I tell people I haven't seen Michael Moore's and Al Gore's documentaries, they're assuming that I am indifferent to major political problems. Now I find that one is supposed to tip the person selling bread at the bakery and the person who hands you your bag of food at the takeout counter? For what service are these people being tipped -- not having spat in one's food?
Am I actually somewhere on the autism spectrum for not having noticed that people are upset with me for my failures to see the right movies, tip for no service and order only black coffee?
PG
If that's the take away message you got from me then you are grossly misreading my comment. I am not saying people ought to tip, merely that there are parts of the country where people are made to feel guilty for not tipping. I never tip at a bakery, almost never at a coffee shop, and I don't tip when I pick up takeout, and I don't think anyone should. As someone who loathes tipping as an institution, I think it should be reigned in, not expanded. I merely resent the moral overtones given to people who don't like tipping, as though we believe people should live in poverty and only earn $2 an hour. I also feel there's a small portion of overly entitled jackasses who go into the service industry, who feel their work is uniquely challenging and underpaid, and should be remedied by receiving 40% tips. As someone who has worked a variety of crappy underpaid jobs in and out of the service industry, I actually almost no sympathy, beyond the, well yeah, we need to broadly redistribute wealth and raise the minimum wage. I actually believe the US should do like the rest of the world does, that is, pay people living wages, and abolish tipping as a form of payment.
oops, I mean, I have actually almost no sympathy
PG and Britta,
We are being asked to feel guilty; not all of us do. How guilty we feel depends on our guilt thresholds. If getting a coffee, you see signs requesting a tip affixed to the tip jar, and hear a barista complaining as you're paying to a different customer that "students never tip", that customer tsk-tsking knowingly along with him, and all of this does not induce guilt, more power to you. But They (cue my 'heightened sense of awareness') will have you believe that the minimum wage, or the slightly higher-than-minimum wages paid to staff at bakeries, coffee bars, and the like, is still not enough, and that if you have enough money not to make your own bread, or to get the occasional latte, then by all means, don't be cold-hearted and refuse the poor cashier your spare change. While I certainly don't make enough to feel the guilt people who stuff three dollars into the tip jar for their $3 coffee drinks perhaps might, I am not immune.
Heh.
Phoebe, that barista definitely goes into the entitled asshole category. In terms of (not) tipping, I do feel guilty, but then I feel resentful that people make me feel guilty for doing things I don't think are necessary or fair to be a good person. Obviously, tipping where mandatory is necessary to be a good person, even if the service is meh, because if you don't, the server is literally being charged to wait on you. On the other hand, I feel where tipping is not someone's main form of remuneration, it should remain a nice extra, where if (and only if) you feel like you got good service worth extra should you tip.
I normally just get black coffee, which I pour myself, so tipping seems really ridiculous (though I know people who think I'm being stingy because of that). Since I go to the same place all the time, I'll put some change in the jar every once in awhile just as a friendly gesture. If I get a complicated drink that someone has to spend a long time making, I'll also put some change into the jar.
I guess the real point of the comment, besides to bitch about tipping, is that a lot of these "pay your servers more than convention requires" shaming is predicated on both 1) your server is your social equal AND 2) you are so much wealthier than your benighted server that it is your duty to help them out of charity. These premises are actually contradictory. I am all for treating everyone with dignity and respect AND tipping what is expected, but I do get annoyed by attitude that, unless you are rich, you have no right to eat out anywhere, or even buy a coffee, because you can't afford/are unwilling to put in a 50% tip, because, well people on low incomes have the right to get coffee without a $3 markup.
Also, I know staff at coffee shops are seen differently than waiters, but my experience was few people looked down upon me, and that those who did were generally so low on the totem pole that being imperious with the girl making you coffee was probably their only chance to boss someone around in life. While it was kind of irritating, responding gracefully was also part of what I was getting paid to do.
In some cases, I think generous tipping is bad, because, in my experience as a barista, often the people who left the biggest tips were often the ones who could least afford it. One coffee shop I worked at was located right next to a call center, and pretty much everyone who came in worked there for minimum wage, was deeply in debt, and basically had extremely dysfunctional lives (I know this because they would talk about it in the coffee shop). It was usually the person in the wheel chair getting evicted and behind in child support who'd (extremely ostentatiously) put a $3 tip in the jar. While I understood and could sympathize with the desire to feel magnanimous, I'd more feel anxiety and the desire to give the money back rather than gratefulness. Instead, I'd have to respond with a pretend over-effusiveness, as though the person had just made my day, in what was really a charade so I could make the day of a person who had nothing going for them in life by making them feel like a high roller.
Ok, sorry, long and incoherent rant, but this topic is close to my heart, because it gets at both issues of cheapness (which I care about) and social class (which I study, though not in America).
Britta,
I got that you don't believe in tipping; what was troubling me was your statement that there is this widespread expectation (from other people! never you!) that one ought to tip in various situations in which it's frankly never even occurred to me to tip. It's inducing anxiety because now I'm wondering how many other social signals out there I'm missing.
It's not that I'm impregnable to guilt; I feel guilty about lots of things (have I billed enough hours this month; whether I should call my mother; when am I going to donate money to Doctors Without Borders instead of just keeping the request letter sitting on the coffee table). I just have never been to a bakery where I was aware of any signal that I ought to be tipping. I have never picked up takeout where I was aware of any signal that I ought to be tipping.
PG,
Sorry, I thought you were emphasizing something else in your comment. My guess is you are from a different part of the country where tipping expectations are not as widespread. It's pretty obvious where I'm from and currently live (Portland, OR and Hyde Park), because people put a container by the cash register with TIPS written in enormous letters with a brightly colored magic marker. Oftentimes there's a snarky comment underneath implying that if you ignore the sign you are an asshole. These tip jars are not just at coffee shops or bakeries, but are even appearing at other retail stores and even some convenience stores, implying an expectation of tipping. From my experiences in other parts of the country, and stories from friends who live mainly in NY, these tip jars everywhere are not unusual, and people who work at these places are often even more aggressive about getting customers to tip than they are on the west coast. For example, I went to the Med bakery and got a mocha. Because the service was kind of crap, I decided not to leave a tip, so left that line blank on the credit card receipt. After handing it back to the woman, she looked at my tip amount, glared at me, and then slammed my drink on the counter with a sneer. So, uh, yes, I felt a little shaming going on at not tipping.
So. Either somehow you have managed to completely overlook these jars AND the often passive aggressive notes posted on them AND the sometimes snarky comments made by cashiers, or you live in a part of the country where this has not caught on yet.
PG,
Next time you're at Chelsea Market, 1) be sure to say hello, because I basically live there on account of the Thai food, and 2) notice the tip jars in I want to say every establishment. Not just bakeries, coffee bars (where "gratuity is not included" is actually a sign in one), and real-food places, but also, most surprisingly, the fish place. Yes, it's a nice service someone does for you, cutting fish or ringing you up for fish, but is this really a tip-type situation? The point is, the jars are right where you pay, impossible to miss.
Britta,
You're right that there's an implied situation in which the person buying is The Yuppie with cash to forever spare, and the server The Working Stiff, even if, as was often the case at UChicago, the person's a student supported by his parents but looking for extra beer-and-mocha money himself. (No shame in that - I worked in college in part to pay for just such beverages). It's interesting that your biggest tippers were also poor - the same is true, anecdotal evidence suggests, of those who give large amounts of money to subway beggars. Is it a way of showing off or a sense of solidarity? Probably depends.
But I think the coffee-bar situation in particular is - at least in NY - a bit different from other service-industry jobs, as I allude to at the end of this rather endless post, in that the server is not so much 'a less fortunate Other' as 'a fight-the-Man version of yourself.' People will thus tip as much or more in a coffee bar as they would in a restaurant where the server gets a much lower base salary, because they're embarrassed that they're the squares in suits, and because the tattooed barista is fighting the good, if unspecified, fight.
Britta,
I live in Manhattan, but in midtown I don't think there's so much of that behavior, because
(a) everything costs so much it would be appalling for them not to be paying the staff a decent wage;
(b) along the lines of Phoebe's theory, the suits who choose to live rather than just work here are pretty resigned (perhaps even proud of?) their suitiness, whereas the suits who want to live inconveniently far away from midtown and the Financial District are more likely to regret;
(c) there don't seem to be a lot of college student types working in this area; it's heavier on recent immigrants, who are thankfully short on attitude, or at least attitude that's clearly expressed in English.
Phoebe,
Will do! Last week was my first visit to Chelsea Market; I only ended up there after googling "New York butcher" and reading a NYT article. If the butcher had a tip jar that I missed, I really feel a little guilty because he gave excellent service and helpful advice and whoever brought in the Halloween chocolate caught my longing stare and offered me some. If ever an establishment that was just selling me a piece of meat deserved a tip, this one did.
And inevitably, someone at Slate decries the list of tips for servers because they constitute treating someone like "king of the universe."
The $14 in the title of the Slate article makes clear that the author was too enraged to notice that the restauranter explicitly cabined his list to the type of establishment he is opening, a fine dining seafood restaurant: "Herewith is a modest list of dos and don’ts for servers at the seafood restaurant I am building... Again, this list is for one particular restaurant, mine, which is under construction in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and will, with any luck, open this spring. I realize that every deli needs a wisecracking waiter, most pizza joints can handle heavy metal, and burgers always taste better when delivered by a server with tattoos and tongue piercing(s)."
Haha, I did notice that post. What's remarkable to me is the whole issue of workers as real-people-too. Does anyone really care about anyone as-a-person at their job, outside of any friendships that might develop? Everyone fulfills some set of tasks, and is valued for completion of those tasks. We are all, in that sense, cogs. (I'm again thinking of 'holistic evaluation'...)
Granted there's more potential for a waiter than a CEO to be humiliated on the job, but this should be gotten around via an atmosphere of mutual respect in restaurants, not via an Acknowledgment of Each Waiter's Unique Humanity by learning his name and food preferences, a road that will lead more often than not to interactions less respectful than flat-out patronizing.
Phoebe,
I think jobs that are more "mechanistic" have a greater potential for the people in them feeling that they are not being seen as people. I'm pretty disposable and far down the totem pole at my workplace, but my bosses generally do act as though I might think of something worthwhile, because they are supposed to have hired me specifically for my brains as well as for the standard set of job skills (punctuality, obedience, hygiene).
Certainly the jobs I've had that explicitly were not jobs that involved much analytical thought (e.g. as a political pollster, where superficially my job was just to call numbers on a sheet, read the people a series of questions and tick their answers in the boxes) were the ones in which I was most likely to be treated disrespectfully by the people with whom I interacted, and was least likely to have any suggestions I made be heard by the management. And, unsurprisingly, these were the jobs in which I wasn't paid much and that I could obtain without even a HS diploma.
Of course, political polling does require a certain degree of social intelligence. We got paid based on the number of people we got to complete the whole questionnaire, and coaxing someone who's ready to get off the phone into staying on for just two minutes, please is an art. I assume being a waitress (a job I've never tried) similarly is done best by people who are attuned to others.
So in that sense it's kind of paradoxical -- in the polling office or at the restaurant or as a door-to-door knife salesperson (another job I've held!) I'm a mere cog in the machine, yet my ability to do my job well depends in part on being able to give others what they want. In contrast, as an attorney I'm more removed from other people but I'm recognized as having a particular set of skills and talents.
PG,
"I think jobs that are more "mechanistic" have a greater potential for the people in them feeling that they are not being seen as people."
I agree, thus why I differentiated between the waiter and the CEO - the same distinctions could be made amongst other jobs as well. But I suppose I've never felt, in any job, mechanistic or otherwise, that I ought to be seen 'as a person', that this was necessary for me to be treated with respect. It always seems false - you're either treated as a simple robot or a sophisticated one, but why is that a bad thing? It's work. In other relationships - including friendships with people from work that are not work-specific - things are otherwise. To overcompensate and overtly remind people with more mechanistic jobs that you know they're people too, rather than treating them with respect, seems not the ideal approach.
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