Hi Pizzetta.
You are the Chez Panisse of pizza joints. I’ve been coming to you for years and everything I’ve ever eaten out of your kitchen is a casual little masterpiece of erotic genius. I love your food and want to keep eating it, and I also want your business to prosper. Which is why I am not posting this as a Google Maps review, but rather as a personal request from a neighbour to a local business that deserves to thrive.
Your food is the best of its ilk in town. But your service is, hands down, the absolute worst. And I’m exhausted with it. Every single time (and remember, I’ve been coming to you for years, because your food is so good) I leave your place, I think, “wow, that food was amazing! And that service was *shocking!* I am deliciously full, and also frustrated, angry, hurt, and insulted!”
Servers are human. If it were a one-off accident, a slip, sure, we all make mistakes. But by now, there has never once been a time when I’ve enjoyed baseline-acceptable, let alone *good* service at your place. Every single time I’ve eaten your food, I’ve been shocked by your service. And that is not good for business.
Let me explain: I’m a middle-aged woman. I eat alone. I wish that wasn’t an “explanation.” I wish that didn’t make everything make sense. But…it will.
I dine within a Bubble of Invisibility. I watch the couples, the families, and the tables of single men all get looked for, seen, and tended to. But me, most of the time I can’t catch a server’s eye to save my life. So I wait, hoping they will think to come. But then they don’t. So then I stick my arm out, feeling like a Problem. Often that doesn’t work either. Every time I go to your place, I have to wait through many trips of your servers going in and out, generously checking on and tending to everyone else’s needs, while I’m invisible with my arm up like I’m in class.
It takes me three requests to get a carafe of water.
My card was once rung up with another table’s $85 bill, and when I pointed this out, I could feel the “she’s a *problem*” energy then directed at me.
I usually have to place my order in two or even three haulings-back of my server. Maybe it’s assumed that women, especially middle-aged women, don’t eat.
I may have a vagina, but I also have a stomach, that loves to eat good food and drink good wine and good coffee. I may have greying hair and bifocals, but I also have a wallet with cold hard American cash in it, that should get exactly the same treatment as a man’s wallet, or a couple’s wallet, or a family’s wallet.
I am tired of my plate being whisked away while there’s still half a pizza on it, a bite of food in my mouth, a fork in midair, and I’m actually chewing.
I’m tired of having parts of my order forgotten more than half the time.
I’m tired of being presented with a bill when I want to order dessert.
I’m tired of ageism, sexism, and singleism, and I’m tired of mentally having to make excuses for other people saying “oh but it’s *unconscious; they really *don’t* see me, they really *did* forget my order, it’s not personal.”
It is personal. It’s so personal. And although I’m a Problem Customer today, in 20 years your young servers are going to be my age. And they will discover that they are still human beings, with a right to the same service as everyone else.
So? What are you going to do about it?
