Richard Weber can still do the hardest part of his job with both hands behind his back, literally. But maybe not for long.
Weber, a waiter at Washington’s iconic Palm restaurant, is a 20-year professional who prides himself on fast service, deferential courtesy and, most important, impeccable and unassisted memory. During a lunch rush last week, he smoothly kept track of the food and beverage demands of almost 20 diners, an ever-shifting matrix of steaks and salads, cocktails and Cokes, running credit cards for some, describing specials to others.
All with nary an order pad in sight.
“I’ve always gone by memory — it just feels more professional that way,” Weber said above the fork-and-knife clatter. “Sometimes you have to go into the walk-in cooler and scream, yeah, but usually I can keep it all straight without too much trouble.”
But the days of the waiter who doesn’t write things down appear to be numbered, according to restaurant owners and industry experts. As Washington’s annual Restaurant Week brings waves of new diners into local eateries, the venerable waiter memory act is in serious decline, a result of increasingly complicated orders — customers who customize because of nutrition concerns or allergies real or imagined — people going out in larger groups, and a generation that seems less comfortable with memorization.
Even at an old-school bastion such as the Palm, fewer and fewer servers are going penless. Weber increasingly finds himself scribbling at least a few notes for large or “complicated” parties. And by complicated, he means those who have been watching cooking shows on television.
“Whoever invented the Food Network should be shot,” said Timothy Glynn, 51, another Palm veteran and a professional waiter for more than 30 years. “Everyone’s a chef now. Everyone wants something special done with their meal. It’s getting so you have to write it down.”
“It used to be a point of pride if you could remember the specials and everybody’s order and get it all right, but now it’s just more complicated,” said Gus DeMillo, part-owner of D.C. Coast, Ten Penh, Acadiana and other local restaurants. “You just don’t see (pad-less waiters) as much as you used to.”
DeMillo himself used to take orders sans paper at such old Washington watering holes as Mr. Henry’s and Timberlake’s. “We never wrote anything down,” he said. “Everybody got their burger medium. But the restaurant business in Washington has evolved, and diners have become more sophisticated. We train our people to write it down now.”
That’s a growing practice, according to Mike Donohue of the National Restaurant Association. “It’s fun to see and something the guests will talk about,” Donohue said. “There’s always that chuckle moment, wondering if they will get it right. But it’s part of the experience that’s unfortunately being lost as orders have gotten more complicated.”
Neurologists take the waiter memory trick more seriously. Researchers have long been interested in servers’ ability to absorb and retain a constant shifting flow of short-term data, especially because, as college psychology students learn, the assumption has long been that human beings can usually keep only about seven new items of information in mind (one reason phone numbers are seven digits long). Several recent studies — including one published last year in the journal Behavioral Neurology that tested the memories of veteran cafe waiters in Buenos Aires — found that the servers’ constant practice actually expands the brain’s memory function.
Smelling a market of baby boomers eager to ward off the fog of aging, several companies have now designed games to mimic the challenge of remembering restaurant orders (including one by Happy-Neuron, a company offering online memory drills, that you can play at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/custom/2010/01/11/CU2010011101467....).
“It’s not that these guys go into waitering because they have good memories,” said Stephen Christman, an expert in memory at the University of Toledo. “They get good at it through constant practice.”
