Dec
Being greeted with a smile is what prepares me for an enjoyable meal, and yet there are restaurant owners who still frown. They should understand the Soup Nazi’s success is an exception.
I write daily news and magazine articles about restaurants in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area, and we have an inordinate amount of restaurants – about 2,000 if you count any full-service restaurant, which includes McDonald’s and the like. If you don’t count fast food, the number is about 1,200. If you don’t count any chain restaurants, then we have about 500 independently owned restaurants with tables worth pulling up to.
Consequently, during the past decade I’ve eaten at about 500 restaurants here on our pretty piece of southern coast. This area is called the Grand Strand, which is a long skinny strip of sand about 60 miles long and a couple-three miles wide in the middle; the middle is where you’ll find Myrtle Beach.
Restaurants I’ve eaten at more than once include ones where the owner or manager greeted me with a smile and made sure I felt welcome and valued. If that welcome isn’t offered, it doesn’t matter how terrific the food is, because an unfriendly reception can actually make me feel physically ill and unable to enjoy my meal.
So please remember that, you managers who look up when customers enter and give them the once-over as if judging whether or not we’re worth your time. When you do that, right away we’re feeling like we chose the wrong restaurant.
Once a friendly tone has been established, I start noticing if the restaurant is clean. The décor doesn’t have to be lavish for me to appreciate it; just being clean and neat is fine. That means the floor is swept, there are no cobwebs in the corners, shelves and knickknacks are dusted, windows are smudge-free, table condiments aren’t gooey from spills or cloudy from fingerprints, tabletops and silverware are sterile, and the server and his or her utensils, such as trays, are tidy.
Now I can be relaxed while checking out the menu. What I hope to find depends on the type of restaurant it is, but in general I’m looking for excellence and creativity.
I hate an appetizer section that lists only boring finger food that probably came out of the freezer. When the list of starters is nothing more than fried cheese, spinach/artichoke dip, nachos, hot wings, onion rings and chicken fingers, I’ve already decided I won’t be back.
In the entrée section, I’m looking for variety.
If it’s a burger joint, I want a darn fine burger with premium topping choices. A choice of what size burger I can get is also nice, because sometimes I’d like to be able to just have a couple of sliders instead of a big burger. One of my favorite steak restaurants offers a choice of gourmet sauces (wine sauce, wild mushroom sauce, etc.) and a choice of premium salts (pink, black, gray).
If we’re talking seafood I just want it to be extremely fresh, and have a choice of interesting side dishes (as opposed to just cole slaw, hush puppies, side salad or the omnipresent zucchini sauté). If the restaurant is Asian, I don’t want a California Roll or Sweet and Sour Pork; I want to see menu choices I’ve never heard of before, like a spring roll containing an innovative blend of ingredients.
It is especially easy to be creative and have fun with the dessert list. Why offer plain old chocolate cake when you could have Colossal Cocoa Madness drizzled with espresso crème, or Triple Fudge Layers topped with Raspberry Anglais?
When you’re creating a menu, try to think of what people would tell their friends after dining at your restaurant. Will they say, “The food was good, but it was nothing special,” or will they say, “You’ve got to try their (insert dish here)! It’s not like anything you’ve ever had!”
But most of all, don’t forget to smile!
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Becky Billingsley is a veteran food writer who covers restaurants in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area. She is the owner of The Food Syndicate, www.DiningTop100.com, MyrtleBeachRestaurantNews.com and Grand Strand Culinary Tours, and is the secretary of the Myrtle Beach chapter of the American Culinary Federation.