The Greatest Restaurant Service I’ve Experienced in 30 Years of Dining

Two decades have passed since I put down a happy hour cocktail to step outside BrickTop’s, a clubhouse in Nashville with caramel leather booths and a proper French dip. The call coming in on my cell was urgent. I still tell the story of our bartender that day. Seeing the distress on my face, knowing I didn’t want to leave that Martini behind, she tucked my glass into a bucket of ice to await my return.

I can’t recall the name of that server. But I can tell you that a few years earlier, near the close of a dinner at Bacchanalia in Atlanta, a manager — James Quinones — noticed that I liked to eat buttons of chèvre on baguette heels. When it came time to replenish the bread, he brought an entire basket of heels. Years later, reading his obituary, I learned from co-owner 1995 F&W Best New Chef Anne Quatrano that Quinones always arranged bouquets of sunflowers at the restaurants where he served. He turned their nodding heads toward the door at the beginning of service, then toward the dining room when it came time to bid goodnight.

Hospitality depends on observation and empathy and the promise of delight. As our American relationship with restaurants matures, that calculus matters more than ever. Over the past generation, the practice of enlightened hospitality, born of restaurateur Danny Meyer’s put-employees-first ethos, and the later idea of unreasonable hospitality (going far above and beyond customer expectations), espoused by restaurateur Will Guidara, have introduced customers to heightened expectations and restaurant staff to new responsibilities.

Restaurateurs now employ a new generation of servers who ask how much to give and what they should get in return. Many diners, recognizing their roles in the exchange, have joined the conversation. With those shifts have come hard truths from activists like Saru Jayaraman, which remind us that restaurant labor relations remain fractious because our system of tip-based compensation has its roots in enslavement and its legacies — this nation’s greatest shame. Yet through all these changes in perspective, the call and response of restaurant life endures. For three decades now, I’ve tracked that ongoing negotiation between the servers and the served, listening closely, making notes, sketching scenes.

Service is the act of seeing. When regulars walk in the doors, restaurants that see well send up flares. Commander’s Palace, the grande dame of New Orleans, drapes regulars’ tables with aqua-blue sashes. Canlis in Seattle, founded in 1950, engraves wineglasses with the initials of beloved guests. At The Villager Tavern in Nashville, the Piarrot family fills dog bowls with select beers for dart players celebrating birthdays.

At the highest level, hospitality can be sublime. Consider a round of after-dinner drinks my wife, Blair, and I enjoyed at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton’s late and beloved New York City boîte — the server plunked down bottles of Madeira and brandy, gratis, and left before we could grasp the generosity of the gesture. Hospitality can also verge on the beautifully ridiculous. That’s the only way to describe one New Orleans moment, just months after the levee failures in 2005, when, toward the end of a dinner that began with barbecue shrimp and stretched long past closing time, 1988 F&W Best New Chef Frank Brigtsen and his wife Marna handed over the keys to their namesake restaurant and told my group of friends, in town to do post-Katrina rebuilding work, to simply put them in the mailbox on the way out.

No matter how assured it is, great hospitality is rarely choreographed; restaurateur Chris Gaither told me in a recent conversation: “The best moments honor our vulnerabilities.” I met Gaither in 2008 in Atlanta, not long after he graduated from Morehouse College. My family was eating breakfast one Saturday morning at the now-shuttered restaurant Parish, where Gaither then worked, when my seven-year-old son Jess fell off a stool and went smack on the concrete floor. A ragged cry trailed his dropped plate. Jess wasn’t hurt, just deeply embarrassed. I was no help, but Gaither, still young in his career, appeared around the corner.

To my amazement, Gaither fell on the floor, a full Chevy Chase pratfall. Then he fell again. By the fourth tumble, Jess was laughing. In the years since, Gaither, who now works in San Francisco, has leveraged that improvisational genius to open a restaurant, Ungrafted, and a wine bar, GluGlu, and to earn the rank of Master Sommelier. I like to think that his ascent was foretold.

Once bound by old-school formality, servers now break through the fourth wall regularly. In Oxford, Mississippi, where I live, Elliot Willard, who tends bar above City Grocery, always reaches up and over the bar to shake my hand before asking what I want to drink. His grasp is a mark of our bond.

Reciprocity, once an exception, now informs both sides of the hospitality exchange. When chef Erick Williams, 2024 F&W Game Changer and founder of Virtue Hospitality Group, got married, a regular from the restaurant where he then cooked gave the young couple a set of copper pots, telling Williams that his food deserved the best. Another gave them a silver frame, which now holds a picture from their wedding day. “I just fed them and treated them with respect,” Williams told me. “That’s what we’re all looking for.”

A collegial sort of shared curiosity is emerging. So is generosity. Liam O’Neil, a musician and producer who buys hard-to-find bottles of wine on his travels, often opens those prizes at Philip Krajeck’s restaurant Folk in Nashville. “I appreciate what it takes to create a great wine list like theirs,” O’Neil said during a studio break this summer. “It’s about learning, always trying new bottles. If I bring in something nice for Phil or the somm, like a Strohmeier from Austria, I get to share a bottle I love with cool people. Drinking that bottle becomes an experience. That deepens our relationship.”

“My spiritual practice is waiting tables,” Caleb Zigas, a program officer at the nonprofit Waverley Street Foundation, told me recently. Zigas moonlights as a server at Delfina in San Francisco. He doesn’t worship or meditate in the classical sense; instead, his liturgy is folding napkins, polishing wineglasses, and aligning forks with knives. “That readies you for service to others.”

“When a guest comes to a restaurant, they’ve already lived a life,” Zigas says. “And they show up with all of it. My job is to hear them in the way they need to be heard and to serve them in the way they need to be served.” As we head past the quarter-century mark, that’s what great hospitality promises. Good food and drink, served and received with grace, compound those everyday investments in our collective well-being.

John T. Edge is a writer and host of the documentary series TrueSouth, now in its eighth season. In his new memoir, House of Smoke, Edge recounts his challenging childhood in the Deep South and finding a sense of belonging through food.