Author: Adam Reiner

Waiters are accustomed to dealing with people’s dietary peculiarities. Unfortunately, some guests find joy in manipulating the menu in unreasonable ways to suit their needs or their budget. It comes with the territory, so servers learn to live with guests who obsess over finding loopholes to get what they want. Menus are only templates for success, not rule books, but of course—like everything in hospitality—some diners take more liberties than others.

There are guests who request to have their salad served after their entrees because they think it makes them seem more cosmopolitan. It doesn’t. Others will order appetizers as their entrees because they prefer to eat light. It’s not ideal, but it’s forgivable. Occasionally, there are guests who cobble together small plates into a makeshift meal or ask the server to course out their food in an unorthodox way. Experienced servers know it’s pointless to resist. Just give the people what they want.

But one menu hack that most servers find unnerving is when guests order side dishes as appetizers. Although there are exceptions, the decision to order a side dish as a first course is often a veiled attempt to game the menu to save money. Even the most well-intentioned guests come across completely obnoxious when they do it.

Naysayers will bristle and scorn at the elitism of presuming that menu items should only be served at the times of the meal that they are intended to be. They’ll say if people want a small dish as their appetizer, it’s their prerogative. Why should you ostracize those people, even if the decision is a financial one? This is a totally valid point. But just because you can do something in a restaurant doesn’t necessarily make it right. You shouldn’t order a sandwich, ask for more bread and then make a second sandwich by redistributing what’s inside the first one. Yet some people do. It’s everyone’s right to do it, but it’s still a bad form.

Implicit in these choices is a disregard for the experience that a restaurant is trying to craft for its guests. Of course, guests have no obligation to follow the menu, but ignoring the framework altogether comes with risks. Many side dishes aren’t as satisfying on their own as they would be complementing main courses, especially when those plates are designed to be shared for the table. I’ve had so many guests ignore my advice against order side dishes to start and then be absolutely miserable with the boring plate of whatever steamed vegetable they had to have. In the end, they cheated themselves.

So follow the template that’s given to you, whenever possible. It’s better to have the side dish come alongside your main course (as it was intended to be) instead of having it come beforehand. Even if it means you’ll end up waiting longer or feeling out of place while your table mates enjoy their appetizers. After all, it wouldn’t be called a side dish if it was meant to be the center of attention. Accepting that fact will improve your dining experience, I promise.

Classic French cooking approaches steak temperatures with a simple elegance. There are four basic ways the French order steak. Bleu means very rare, quickly seared on each side. Saignant, literally meaning bloody, is a bit more cooked than bleu, but still quite rare. À Point implies “perfectly cooked” (the closest to our Medium Rare) and Bien Cuit, well done. The French don’t fuss with superfluous language around ordering meat; you like your steak one way or the other. The behavior is anchored in a tradition of respect for the chef’s expertise and deference to the talent in the kitchen.

Americans aren’t able to speak so abstractly about cooking meat and are more suspicious of the chef’s faculties. To make steak temperatures more scrutable, restaurants (with the blessing of the USDA) devised a vernacular to help diners better understand the different gradations of doneness. The approach is rather dogmatic with five concrete meat temperatures, now ubiquitous: Rare, Medium Rare, Medium, Medium Well and Well Done. Restaurant chefs have adhered to this scale for generations but they are a constant source of headaches for hospitality professionals. No matter how streamlined these guidelines have become, there will always be differences in perception around how we should define them.

Today’s diners are becoming increasingly nuanced about how they like their meat cooked. As palates become more sophisticated, defining proper meat temperatures has evolved into a significantly more complicated conversation. It’s disturbingly common to hear guests request “plus” temperatures, meaning they want their meat cooked a shade in between two standard ones. “Medium Rare Plus” implies they like their steak cooked a little more than Medium Rare but not quite Medium. Unfortunately, most restaurant kitchens are too busy to handle this level of specificity.

Trying to make guests happy who order their meat cooked outside of the standard spectrum can drive servers—and chefs—to madness. If we insist that guests adhere to the accepted scale, we increase the likelihood that they’ll send their food back. If they’re unhappy with the finished product, they’ll blame us for not making enough of an effort to understand their preferences. If we allow them to order fabricated steak temperatures that don’t exist, we must face the rage of an ornery chef who bristles at anything that strays outside of protocol. As with many hospitality conundrums, we’re always caught between a rock and a hard place. 

A restaurant kitchen isn’t an artist’s studio; it’s a factory. As a guest, you have a responsibility to understand that not every element of your dining experience is customizable. When you dine in a restaurant, you are enjoying plates or food that were engineered to be efficiently served simultaneously to a dining room full of hungry people. Expecting your initials monogrammed on every dish shows a lack of respect for the orderliness that is necessary for a cohesively functioning kitchen.

If waiters could somehow escort every guest who ordered “Medium Rare Plus” into the sweltering kitchen to explain to the grill cook how they like their steak, not a soul would ever ask for it that way again. The power that many guests feel when it comes to the peculiarities of cooking their food is in the luxury of not having to deal with the shame of facing the sweaty cook who’s making it. Good guests won’t abuse that power.