Vist theallusionist.org/enjoy to hear this episode and read all about it.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, throw a grape across the room for language to catch in its mouth. Then I clean grapes off the floor.
This is the last Food Season episode in the current batch, and it’s about something that I find hard to stomach.
On with the show!
HZ: Since I started the Allusionist five years ago, I’ve managed to overcome most of my linguistic prejudices. ‘Literally’ also means its own opposite? That’s fine! Meanings flip all the time! Someone said ‘me’ when it should have been ‘I’ or vice versa? Mate, the only pronoun trouble I care about now is people’s gender identities being respected! There’s a rogue apostrophe in a shop sign? Whatever, not a high priority problem for the world! (Maybe I can encourage moss to grow over it?)
But, there are a few linguistic peeves that still lurk, and irk, and one of them - and this is so ridiculous, there could scarcely be a more trivial non-problem, but it’s this: when I’m eating out, and the server brings the food, and they say, “Enjoy!” Immediately provoking an internal shout of: “What did you think I was planning to do with it?”
Also, I feel that the word “Enjoy!” should not be used as a command. If you can follow something with “or else!” it doesn’t come across as that friendly.
But: “Enjoy!” happens, and it happens a lot, and in the interests of examining and exterminating my prejudice, I want to know what it is for.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: My name is Sara Brooke Curtis and I’m an independent radio producer, and I worked in restaurants and the front of the house as a server for about 15 years. I was really fascinated by watching people, what they reveal about themselves at the table, which is a lot: their own insecurities, their identity, their issues, their really dark side, their ugly side, their beautiful side. It all seemed to come out around the table. I felt like I was sort of led into this secret club where I had access to psychology.
HZ: Alright Sara, analyse what “Enjoy!” is for.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: You need to have some sort of parting words, letting people know that you're excited for them to have their meal, like go for it. You have to find a way to exit and also let them know that you're like in this experience with them. So it's some sort of signpost.
STEPHANI ROBSON: If they said "Bon appetit" it would sound very pretentious, although that's really what they're doing, right? In French culture, that's what you say. And it's polite to say that.
HZ: Stephani Robson is a restaurant design psychologist and senior lecturer at Cornell University.
STEPHANI ROBSON: We don't really, I think, have anything in English that is the parallel to the French bon appetit. "Good appetite," you wouldn't say that. So "enjoy", I guess it's just a way of acknowledging that, you know, let the eating commence, but to just put food down and not say anything - I don't know, now that you've got me thinking about it, I don't know what I would say.
HZ: "It's food!"
STEPHANI ROBSON: "It's food!" It's like you're feeding a spaniel. “It’s food. Here you go, Fluffy, eat this."
HZ: I suppose if you were in a home setting, you might say "Tuck in" or "Dig in" or something like that.
STEPHANI ROBSON: That's right. "Here you go." Which is a little casual. You know, you're sitting at a very high end restaurant, they don’t go, "Here ya go." So I guess the 'enjoy' is some kind of verbal signal that that says, "I am here as a server, I'm a presence, and this is me giving something to you." And if you do that without any kind of verbal interaction, it feels very transactional.
HZ: Some of the more transactional phrases, such saying the name of the dish as they place it in front of the diner, or asking something like “Can I get you anything else?” - these seem usefully functional to me, as they ensure the diner is receiving the correct food, and ascertain whether or not they have further requirements. Plus, they are EMOTIONALLY NEUTRAL, what is wrong with me.
STEPHANI ROBSON: But yes, ‘enjoy’ is an interesting choice. We should maybe move to "consume!"
HZ: I doubt “Enjoy!” can create enjoyment from scratch, but I do imagine that it does work better to encourage enjoyment than more negative terms might. Alas, I could not find scientific analysis of this.
Test subjects! Which tastes better: bite A [ENJOY!] or bite B [I found this in the gutter]?
Which tastes better: bite C [Enjoy!] or bite D [nobody loves you]?
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: An interesting thing with ‘enjoy’ is that it's become so common, because it’s so normal, so many people do it in all the different restaurants, to such an extent that there are restaurants that you could not say 'enjoy'. That was their biggest pet peeve, was saying ‘enjoy’. And it was massive.
HZ: Why?
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Because they didn't want their servers to act like robots and they thought that if you said 'enjoy' that people would feel like they're anywhere, and that you're not expressing anything; you're just saying this thing that people say all the time.
HZ: Where does it come from? Is there this cabal like the Pantone colour thing where it's like, "This year everyone will be wearing forest green" - is there that for service vocabulary?
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Yeah, I think there is. I really do think there is. There's not like a hub or like some finishing school you go to for restaurant vocabulary. Then everyone goes back to the restaurants like, "Alright, now we have it guys." But how does that stuff travel? That's really interesting to think about.
STEPHANI ROBSON: That might be because some servers move from one restaurant to the next, because it's a pretty transient business.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: I do think that it's probably some of it does get handed down from these like reality cooking shows and all that kind of stuff. I think that that is a part of it to sort of taking that on.
HZ: So sometimes it’s spread virally, other times it’s in a restaurant’s manual or script.
STEPHANI ROBSON: It's deliberate with chain restaurants because often they script a lot of it; with independent restaurants, not so much. But there are some things that you try to teach people in in restaurant service that are fairly consistent: you want to be clear, you want to be friendly; it's also because you've got to be fast. What we sell in restaurants is time, not so much food. So a server has to be able to communicate effectively pretty quickly in order to get that table served and turned ready for the next party.
HZ: And presumably it differs at different economic levels as well, because some places want to cultivate an informal atmosphere, some of them want to be upscale.
STEPHANI ROBSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. So the language you're going to use, how you approach a table, you know, a lot of of restaurants will use very familiar language like they'll say, "How are you guys tonight?" Which you would never do, or I would hope you would never do, in a more formal setting. And the more formal setting, of course, there's the usual sort of preamble about "Have you been here before?" And "Do you know how we work?" which can be aggravating for a lot of people.
HZ: That's an interesting thing - that I think a lot of things that are meant to make us feel comfortable make us feel very annoyed. Like when they say, "Let me explain how the menu works" and it's pretty much always intuitive.
STEPHANI ROBSON: Yeah! It sort of is a bit of a slap in the face. And also, there's this feeling that they're trying to upsell you. "Let me explain how the menu works. Most people order four small plates, two of them protein, and have great lashings of wine." You always feel like they're they're completely upselling you and not letting you decide for yourself.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Yes, there's definitely scripts, but I think in general it's more nuanced than actual script, it's more like here are things you cannot say. And here are things that we really want you to say. But there are restaurants that mean that literally there's language you can not use at the table. And if a manager or the owner catches you using it, it's a big deal because language is huge around the table. Huge huge huge huge huge.
HZ: So what would be some examples of things you could not say. I'm imagining obviously the stronger swear words for a start would be off the menu.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: There is a restaurant that I worked, there was an olive dish that a lot of people ordered and the olives had pits in them, and you were not allowed to say, "be careful, there are pits in the olives," because immediately their thought is that it plants the seed of fear before they're consuming food. So if you say "Be careful" it immediately puts people on guard as opposed to feeling relaxed like everything's taking care of for them. So instead you have to actually be more long-winded, because what do you say to let someone know right away there's pits, so they don't swallow them and choke? You say like, "Just so you know, there are pits in the olives." You just can't say, “Be careful.”
HZ: Would you be allowed to be kind of hyperbolically cautious what you would like. "There are pits in the olive so don't smash your teeth with one"?
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Oh no. Because you don't want to suggest that there could be an issue. It's sort of an art, really, of letting people know that there is an obstacle to consuming this food safely, but that they're going to be OK, but you haven't taken care of it for them, so they have to do it on their own. It's really a strange dance to figure out what language to use for that. And same thing with plates being very hot, so you go to put it down and instead of saying, “Be careful,” you have to just try and say, “Just so you know, the plates are very hot.” You don't say, “The plates are very hot, so I don't want you to burn yourself” because then someone's going, “Oh god, I'm gonna burn myself.” Even though that's what is implied by saying the plates are hot. The other thing you're not supposed to say - and this is the case in any restaurant I worked, even though people say it a lot: if the server is coming to the table to check to see if you're done eating, you're not supposed to say, “Are you still working on that?"
STEPHANI ROBSON: Oh, you just hit one that I hate: "Are you still working on that?" One thing that I was trained to do as a child, and maybe you were too, which was to place your knife and fork in a specific position, to indicate you were finished. And I gather that is a lost art, because you don't see people doing it; and so servers have to sort of figure out what the state of your meal is and whether it's safe to clear. But, "Are you still working on that?" implies that you're at a coal face or something and you're trying to chip away at it.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: But do you know what the thinking is around that?
HZ: I'd love to know.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: You don't want anyone to be thinking about work. You don't want them to be thinking that food is work and their experience at a restaurant has any relationship to work. Even though ‘working’ isn't implying that kind of working, just the idea that you're saying something that's related to, say, their day beforehand, it takes them away from the experience; and you don't want them to have to do any work the whole night, you just want them to be completely taken care of. And that is the hardest one because it's just "Are you still working on that?" And actually, maybe you're going to hate this one: what you're supposed to say is, "Are you still enjoying?"
HZ: Mm. That's very presumptuous.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: It sure is. But also you know some restaurants, they want to be confident; if somebody hasn't said they don't like something, the assumption is that they are, and that moment can give them a way out, if for some reason they aren't enjoying something, that could come out there. I don’t know.
HZ: It's certainly a good idea to go with that presumption of enjoyment. That probably does work psychologically, to an extent.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Exactly. And then some people are like, “Yeah, I'm still enjoying.” And then it's the same thing where like some servers go back way too many times and “I guess I'm still enjoying?” And then it's like, are you really still enjoying it? I don't think you're enjoying anymore.
HZ: That's a problem with 'enjoy'. I don't think you can use it more than once a meal. You can't say 'enjoy' every time you put down a course, because then it really does seem automated, and like "You had your chance with the salad to enjoy this and you still haven't learned, so I've still got to keep telling you."
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Okay so no "enjoy". No "be careful"; no "are you still working on that? No "Are you done yet?" either. No like assuming that someone is done - the thing you're supposed to say is "may I?" "May I?" So you sort of do this little hand motion towards the table if you think that someone's done, “May I go in and remove the plates?” But not "Are you done?" because you don't want people to feel rushed.
STEPHANI ROBSON: But, yeah. "Are you still working on that?" Please, everybody. Knife, fork, parallel in the middle of the plate.
HZ: Or put a little traffic light next to you.
STEPHANI ROBSON: Well, there are restaurants that do that, but it's not about clearing. But you've probably been to these Brazilian steakhouses that give you the little desk that's red on one side and green on the other. And you just flip it on your table when you want someone to come to your table and deliver you huge piles of meat or whatever it is you need. But it to me, it's very cunning because when you're trying to enjoy a meal and the server's kind of hovering and trying to get a sense of, "should I go back to the kitchen and tell them to get the next course ready or should I be clearing something?" It's nice when you have that kind of nonverbal way of communicating, "Yep, you're good to go" or "No, no. I'm in the middle of a really dishy bit of gossip. Please don't bother me."
HZ: Yeah, I appreciate that it's difficult to gauge where someone is at with their meal. But I like to be served and then benevolently ignored. So if I need something, I can catch someone's eye, but they don't come back every few minutes and check - or specifically after you've just put your first mouthful of food and they come up, "How's everything tasting?" It's too soon. It's too soon.
STEPHANI ROBSON: It's too soon. And they have the same talent that dentists do of asking you something that requires a verbal response when you obviously cannot give one. But it's true that a really good server, one of the best things they can do is learn to read people. But part of that is also how you design the restaurant, believe it or not, is servers have to be able to see what's happening at their tables. And if you design a restaurant with a lot of booths or high backed things where you can't see what's going on in the table, servers are going to be floating around just so they can kind of get a sense of what they should be doing next. A good server anyway. But you're right that there is an art to being supportive without being intrusive.
HZ: I appreciate as well that what the servers want to do, or know is effective, may not be what management expects them to do.
STEPHANI ROBSON: Well, that's true. You know, this is a real challenge because you get servers who realize their table wants to stay a little longer. And if there's nobody waiting for a table, that's fine; they can stay as long as they like, you know, keep offering them additional items or bring them coffee or whatever it is. But when there's a wait for a table, there's real pressure both from management and from the server to get that table turned over. But it's true that management sometimes would like there to be - how do I put this? I won't say less rapport at the table, but their goal is, you know, get that table going. And the server might think, you know, if I have a good rapport with this guest, it may turn into a better tip. So this is something I know that in some parts of the world where tipping is not the way it is the United States, it's probably less of an issue. But in the US, most restaurants still rely very heavily on tips for their servers. And so servers are very, very sensitive to how can they create the environment that will maximize the tip without being so annoying that that tip is jeopardized.
HZ: Yeah, I feel bad that in the US in particular, it's just more obvious when someone is doing something because they desperately need you to tip them and therefore they are kind of being punished for a bad system that isn't their fault and that they have to participate in to get paid.
STEPHANI ROBSON: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
HZ: Then on top of this and the many practical and physical and emotional demands of service, there are the customers with their infinite variety of quirks and sensibilities.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Some people say, "How are things tasting?" And I always thought that was fine. And I have a friend recently who, we were talking about this stuff and she was like, "It makes me so grossed out. I can't believe someone will ask me that - ‘How are things tasting?’ It just sounds disgusting to me." And she was like, "I feel like it's almost too intimate. Like how are things tasting?"
HZ: Because it's inside your mouth?
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Exactly, right. Even though it means something larger like how is your meal tasting like "Are you enjoying it?" It's just another way of saying it. But she said it just gives her the heebie jeebies, “How are things tasting?”
HZ: There is so much to be annoyed about. Maybe it would be better if restaurants are entirely conducted in silence. Or emoji - just do thumbs up all the time.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: There you go! I'm sure that's coming - but then there's an art to it and it keeps it interesting, keeps it dynamic, because people want really different things. People are coming to the table with such different experiences and set of expectations and, you know, just days, like the days that lead up to whatever is bringing them to that moment, and you don't have any idea what's going to trigger somebody.
HZ: Can't please everyone.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: You can’t please everybody.
HZ: I guess, in our societies anyway, it's one of the only circumstances remaining that most of us have where there's an element of servility in the interaction. And I think for some people that's uncomfortable. Like for me, I'd rather the ground swallow me up than ever complain about the food. And I think for other people they really love the idea that they're kind of dominant.
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Love it. Love it. But then there's also there's like a sort of downfall of both sides. There's people who never want to complain who then get to the end of the meal and decide to say something then like, "Just so you know, the fish is kind of meh, I wouldn't get it again." That's actually the biggest heartbreaker for people who work in restaurants, because it's like you're trying the whole time to make this person have the most incredible experience they possibly can. And it's all about trying to read people's body language. But at the same time you're only really responsible for what their words are saying, because you can't read everybody's minds and be like, "Oh, they raised their eyebrow that way, they must like it or not like it." You can't. But if somebody hasn't used their words the whole time to tell you that they are unhappy with something, you have no opportunity to fix it. And so at the end when you find out, or if they leave you a bad tip and write a weird note, that feels so unfair. It's like, yeah, I could have done something! We're here to make you feel good. But a lot of people don't do that.
HZ: Saying 'use your words' - that's not something I hear a lot from friends who have toddlers. The toddler is crying and they'll say, "No, use your words."
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Exactly. Yeah. A lot comes out around food with whatever is going on with you in your life.
STEPHANI ROBSON: It is true that this is an emotional job. It's one that requires a certain level of of enthusiasm for interacting with other people.
HZ: Stephani Robson is a restaurant design psychologist and senior lecturer at Cornell University. Sara Brooke Curtis is a former server, and now a radio producer - some of her recent work you might be particularly interested in is on the podcast Gravy from the Southern Foodways Alliance, such as her episode about what you can read into menus, or her episodes about the writer and actor Eugene Walter, or how wedding catering works.
Stick around for today’s Minillusionist, in which I will divulge the most condescending use of ‘enjoy’ I have come across.
MINILLUSIONIST
A few years ago I was staying in a hotel in Manchester, and you know those rubber mats you put into the bathtub so you don’t slip? This one came with instructions. And a blurb! It said:
“A shower can be the perfect way to refresh and invigorate.” Thanks for matsplaining the concept of a shower to me.
“To ensure you enjoy the experience to its full, we’ve provided this bath mat, should you wish to use it. For your safety, please follow these steps when using the mat.” There are four steps. FOUR!
“Step 1. Partially fill the bath with water, then firmly press the bath mat suckers to the bottom of the bath.
Step 2. Ensure the mat is flat before and during use.”
Brace yourself, the tension is about to amp up -
“Step 3. When stepping into the bath, step carefully onto the mat” - or what? Or what? Now I’m feeling the fear!
“Step 4. Enjoy.”
HOW DARE YOU TELL ME HOW TO FEEL, BATHMAT! I will non-enjoy this shower if I want!
Now, maybe I undervalue my own expertise in using a bathmat. I’ve been using bathmats without instructions for most, if not all, of my life, largely without incident, and perhaps took for granted my adequacy at bathmat-use. But if you, bathmat, think that people can’t be trusted to use a bathmat without instructions, maybe you shouldn’t trust people to use a bathroom? Bathrooms are riddled with potential death traps! What if the command to enjoy makes us reckless, and in our pursuit of pleasure we step carelessly onto the mat, breaching instruction 3? You’ve stressed me way too much with instructions 1-3 for me to be able to obey instruction 4 even if I wanted to, which I don’t, for reasons aforementioned.
And then, just when you reach the critical point, the instructions stop! “3. Step carefully onto the mat; 4. Enjoy” end! Fin! That’s it! So the mat doesn’t even tell me what I’m supposed to be enjoying: enjoy stepping carefully on the mat? You don’t credit me with the intellectual power to use you without multi-stage instructions, yet you assume I have the initiative to loop back to the introductory paragraph to deduce that I should complete instructions 3 and 4 whilst having a shower? I’m not even going to use you when I have a shower - how do you like that? You don’t care, you’re an inanimate object.
Who is the bigger fool - the bathmat, the person incapable of using the bathmat without instructions, or the person arguing with a bathmat?
The Allusionist is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the greatest independent podcasts. Hear them all at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
latration, noun (usually facetious): barking.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Sarah Geis. The music is by Martin Austwick; you can see us play live, check theallusionist.org/events.
The show is on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - the handle is allusionistshow - and over on the website you’ll find all the episodes, additional reading matter about each one, the full dictionary entry for the randomly selected words, transcripts, a lexicon of each word that has been discussed in the show - that’s all at theallusionist.org.
