our good friends who just moved took us out to dinner last night to thank us for all of the extra help during the move and to congratulate me on a new job. they wouldn’t tell us where we were going beforehand, but we ended up at delmonico’s–a very swank restaurant. the food was great (i had an elk chop!) but i think i was most impressed with the service. see, i don’t really eat at swank restaurants very often. pretty much never. here are some of the tiny details that made this dining experience different than any i’ve had before.
1. coat check–i’ve seen it on tv, never really done it in real life. very convenient.
2. elk chop–nuff said.
3. a crumb squeegee–after our bread course, the waitress came by and took our plates and then cleared the crumbs off of our table cloth with this cool tool. she cleaned my spot first and i didn’t see the tool and i was pretty sure she had just done some magic. as she did other people’s crumbs, i could see that it was a simple tool about the size of a pencil and shaped like a teeny shelf that she swept the front edge over the tablecloth and then when she picked it up, all the crumbs stayed on her shelf until she deposited them on her serving tray. i was very impressed.
4. complimentary palate-cleansing lemon sorbet between courses when our entrees were a bit slow.
5. clean silverware for each course, no matter how small the course.
6. when my friend and i took the obligatory trip to the restroom, the waitress came by and shook out our napkins (which we’d left wadded up on the table) and folded them up in a fancy roll.
7. cloth-like paper towels imprinted with the restaurant’s logo in the bathroom to dry hands on.
8. dessert “on the house” because our entrees were slow to arrive–i got bananas foster. other folks got an amazing apple crumb cobbler thing with cinnamon ice cream, served in a mini-cast iron skillet, and creme brulee served in a stylish coffee cup with a curvy plate that the cup set into and a few molasses cookies on the plate.
it was pretty cool. and yummy.
