Recently I took my nine-year-old daughter to Las Vegas for a daddy-and-daughter getaway. We tasted the chocolates at the new Payard Patisserie.
We watched the water and light show in the fountain in front of the Bellagio. We had a truffle-oil pizza at Canaletto in the indoor version of St. Mark's Square in the Venetian. We went to two Cirque du Soleil shows. We ate lots of gelato. We shopped.
And we learned how widely service can vary from restaurant to restaurant.
One day we tried to get an order of bacon cooked crispy at a cafe in one of the most upscale hotels. Now, you wouldn't think that crispy bacon would be a big deal. To crisp bacon, you simply cook it a little longer. It doesn't involve a lot of skill or require a degree from the Culinary Institute of America. So, when our grumpy waitress brought us a plate of undercooked apple-smoked bacon, I was duly surprised to hear her reply to my request for crunchy bacon.
"We don't make it that way," she said.
It was such an odd response that it stopped me for a moment. I wondered if they also refuse to toast bread or to boil eggs. I said again, "We'd like it a bit more crispy." So she took my plate away, saying, "Well, the kitchen won't like that."
The kitchen won't like that? Excuse me. Is the kitchen paying for the meal? Does the kitchen really care about cooking bacon a little longer?
Interestingly, it was a different waitress that brought the re-cooked bacon back. It was now stiff as a board. But it was crispy.
By contrast, our request the next morning at another cafe in a slightly even more upscale hotel didn't cause our waitress to flinch at all. You see, my daughter dislikes the smell of eggs. (I trust it's a phase she's going through.) I, on the other hand, love eggs. And if I'm ordering the remarkably good corned beef and pastrami hash they serve for breakfast, I definitely want poached eggs, too. So I asked the waitress if she could serve the hash to me at the table where I sat with my daughter (whose idea of breakfast is a large basket of sweet rolls), and serve the eggs separately – at a table halfway across the room.
She didn't even flinch.
"No problem," she said. “Do you want the hash first, or the eggs?"
I asked her if this was the strangest request she'd ever gotten.
"Strange?" she replied. "This isn't strange. Honey, it doesn't even come close."
– Merrill Shindler