I’m sitting with my friends at a restaurant and the place is pretty much full. The waiters are running from table to table, taking in orders, handling bills for food and drinks, cleaning up tables… Altogether, it’s really loud. Every now and then you can hear a bell ring telling one of the waiters that an order is ready.
The waiters aren’t bothered by bells ringing, they have other stuff to do. I hear the benn ring again, I assume the cook has lost his patience as he taps the bell a couple of times. One of the waiters finds the time to go to the kitchen and pick up the order. I can see him coming up to a table that’s two tables away from us and he yells ‘tagliatelle with truffles’ and I see one charming lady raised her hand. The waiter then yells ‘spaghetti carbonara’ and a gentleman in his 50s says, in a deep voice, ‘mine’. And so the waiter continues his session with the remaining guests at the table, and I’m guessing you can see how this can become annoying.
If I was in the business of profiling guests, based on what I’ve heard about this restaurant, I’d assume people over 50 years of age more-or-less prefer to eat pasta and that this restaurant is well known for having great pasta. Professional ‘profiling’ is another subject and we’ll get to that one later.
Actually, I’m wondering, why are these waiters asking who ordered which meal when they come up to a table? Why does everyone have to know who ordered what meal? Why should the communication between waiters and kitchen staff be conducted as if we were in the 1990s?
Is there really no better way of communicating??
There is!
Here at the Utiliter company, we have developed a solution, one which will help out waiters and they won’t have to ask who ordered what mean anymore. Some people might say ‘you should train your ability to remember you dumb f*ck 🙂 This is seemingly possible as the same person will take an order and deliver it (but even the most skilled waiters have problems remembering every item that has been ordered if they’re in the middle of rush hour at the restaurant).
But, how do you solve a problem when taking orders and delivering them isn’t conducted by the same person?
We decided to simply call this ‘Table Placement’. With this small feature, no other person sitting at the restaurant will have to hear what you want to eat today and everyone in your party will receive the exact meal they’ve ordered without having to answer any questions.
To make communication between waiters and kitchen staff even more advanced, we have a solution that speeds up that process and maximizes the satisfaction of the guest. We’ll talk about that in our next blog post.
