You go out to restaurants to experience the gracious rituals of hospitality, not to feel like you’ve engaged in a transactional relationship. You and your hosts both have the same goals — that you feel welcomed, cared for, and sated. The bill? It’s a tiny slip of a thing, clipped under a postcard, disposed of quickly with the tap of a microchip. 

Which is why you sometimes lie. When the server swings by five minutes after dropping your entrees and asks about the food, you say “everything’s great” whether that’s true or not. Maybe you should’ve asked more questions, or maybe restaurant food is always salty to your taste. Everyone else seems to be enjoying their meals so why make a scene. 

Forgive me, but that’s bullshit. 

If you don’t like your $46 fillet of halibut for any reason, you should give an honest response. You’re not asking them to do anything about it; that’s up to the restaurant, but how they respond shows their true commitment to hospitality.

So let me tell you about the worst god-awful fried chicken I’ve had in recent memory at Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf. My friend and I were sharing a big steak and scouting the menu for a second entree with the server’s help. “If you’ve never had our fried chicken, you really should try it,” he said when I showed mild interest in the roasted chicken. He pushed, we bit. 

I had assumed we’d get, you know, fried chicken: legs, thighs, breasts, wings. What arrived was a platter of three desiccated planks of meat sheathed in cold brown armor. What cut were they? I couldn’t tell or see in the dark dining room. When the server came by to check on us I asked. “They are boneless thighs,” he answered. “How are you enjoying them?” 

“Not too much,” I admitted. I told him I was expecting bone-in chicken and that the meat was pretty dry. He offered to bring something else, but we demurred; it was late in the meal, we’d had plenty to eat and we’d surely take the rest home. “It was just my honest feedback,” I said. 

When the bill came, the chicken had been comped. We didn’t expect it or ask for it, particularly since the rest of the serving was sitting in a box on the table. We thanked him and tipped well based on what the bill should have been. 

I have faced this situation many times. I usually don’t ask for anything other than to have the kitchen recook a piece of meat, but if a server wants to know what I think of the food I’ll say it. Most of the time I really don’t want to return it or ask for a substitution or comp. Sometimes I’ll breezily say the meal is “fine” if that’s the case, and every once in a while a perceptive server will ask, “Just fine?” Then I’ll elaborate. 

Every restaurant handles it differently. Some comp the dish, some offer a dessert on the house, some register the comment and say they hope we’ll give them another chance. All are perfectly fine responses.

This is the act of hospitality, something that can turn a guest into a patron. Yeah, I hated the fried chicken. But I felt cared for at the meal, and when I go back to Bavette’s, I hope I get the same server.