Ask George: What’s more important to you in a restaurant, good food or good service?

What’s more important to you in a restaurant, good food or good service? – David L., St. Louis

While the obvious response is that both are important, the questioner added, “and no waffling, pick one.”

Over the last few decades, I contend that the quality of restaurant food has improved overall. I experience a lot fewer bad meals than in days past. Most are decent, a lot very good, and a few excellent. What changed for the worse is the level of service. Blame the pandemic for forcing a lot of great restaurant people to seek other employment. Today, many restaurants have yet to return to pre-pandemic norms, which should make customers appreciate a welcoming front desk staff, a present and aware manager/owner, a speedy bar, an efficient kitchen, and a server with the hospitality skills to create a memorable experience. I know I do. For me, it’s service over food. We also asked SLM‘s dining team to weigh in:

Collin Preciado: Service. Subjecting oneself to an inattentive and/or hostile front-of-house simply isn’t necessary in a market with plenty of other good options. The quality of your food can be a subjective experience anyway, so if the service is bad, that impression will likely find its way into your meal. There’s a restaurant with a good menu that I recently stopped going to for this very reason. There were too many visits where the servers were preoccupied with expressing their absolute and total indifference to the task at hand. A single instance of bad service can easily be excused, but when it begins to feel like the culture, it starts to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Lynn Venhaus: While the whole experience is important, the food is first and foremost. No one wants to shell out hard-earned money for mediocre food. Why leave the house if I can make something better at home? I want dishes that are flavorful, memorable, and satisfying—nicely presented, cooked with strong techniques and made with pleasing the diner in mind. When there is a lack of effort, skimping on ingredients or too much pretension and preciousness, I will not be back. That first bite should be a taste treat. We should be able to savor all of the special little touches and notice the amount of care and attention that went into preparation. Starting with quality ingredients has always been a constant, but I notice the little things more these days—what they go to the trouble to make from scratch, those ‘house-made’ details, or how they make something their own. All of us want to feel welcome, and no one wants to be treated cavalierly. But with the competition out there, I think the average consumer comes first for the food and then stays for the service.

Zach Gzehoviak: It begins and ends with good service: a mixture of attentiveness, foresight, conviviality, and professionalism. Your food may be great, but if your staff is poor at delivering it, a bad taste will be left in anyone’s mouth.

Bill Burge: If you pin me to good food vs. good service, good food every time—which is why I like to sit at the bar when it’s an option, because I don’t particularly care about the theatrics of being waited on. But I think we’re missing the third option in this question: good experience. As we’ve drifted into this phase of the pandemic where food and labor costs have forced restaurants to raise prices considerably, more focus needs to be put into the overall atmosphere and experience provided. I’m not dining out because I need sustenance; I’m dining out because I want to have a good time with my family or go on a date with my wife, and either one is now an expensive endeavor. What we’re noticing is that the places we’re returning to aren’t the ones we’d objectively say have the best food or service. It’s the places we’ve had more fun, which often cost less because we got something out of an experience we can’t create at home. Some would say that’s a component of service, but I would argue it’s more about a vibe, something harder to quantify, and something not impacted by rising costs.

Cheryl Baehr: Without question, it’s service. For me, the biggest takeaway from a dining experience is how the restaurant makes me feel. It’s much more comprehensive than how a particular dish tastes, what the place looks like, or how interesting its cocktail menu is. You could say that service is just one of those elements, but I feel that it plays a much larger role because it sets the tone for everything else. I’d consider it pretty much synonymous with overall hospitality, which is the foundation of the business. You could be eating the most stunning piece of fish ever cooked, but if the restaurant makes you feel like crap, it ruins the entire experience. Then again, Hamishe Bahrami of the late, great Café Natasha could smack me across the head with a wooden spoon, and I’d still be happy eating her beef shish kebabs…

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