Hospitality & Bars

[martin]

Starting this thread for a variety of reasons, one of which is to establish a potential parallel line of discussion to the Unions & Bars thread. In my opinion, they are not unrelated.

Last night (a Wednesday), friends and I tried to grab a pre-dinner drink at the lobby bar at the Waldorf-Astoria, and our welcome was that there would be a two drink minimum.

Yeah…

Setting aside that we didn’t want two rounds, didn’t have time for two rounds, and many people shouldn’t or can’t drink that much in one sitting, this is a bar where the drinks already cost north of $30 apiece. I guess some genius at the Waldorf-Astoria decided to it was time to establish a $100 minimum spend per customer (with tax and tip). This, at a hotel lobby bar.

For want of a better term, I would call this experience anti-hospitality. Better suggestion?

Needless to say, we went elsewhere. We bounced off the Monkey Bar (utterly overrun) to the bar at the Modern restaurant at MoMA. There we were welcomed and immediately accommodated. The staff were infallibly gracious, the drinks good (and about $20 each).

This experience was good hospitality. (Danny Meyer style.)

Unfortunately, I am finding that variations on the former experience are becoming more common (in the United States), and the latter rarer. I am souring on bothering to go out.

–

This is a 2.5 hour interview with Angus Winchester from 2025 that many here have already seen, but I encourage everyone interested in this domain to give it the time. It has chapters, so it can be consumed in parts.

#8 Angus Winchester - 36 Years of Bartending, The Art of Hospitality, Classic Cocktails, Tanqueray

[fredyarm]

Hospitality has suffered a major decline from the Pandemic where loss of senior staff, reliance on QR codes instead of conversation, and 90 minute time limits made the guest feel happy to be out but rushed and feeling a bit cold from the interactions. The QR code thing has mostly gone away, but the time limit aspect is still around in restaurants and bars (even in ones that have opened up in the last 3 years). One place I tried out at as a bartender focused on efficiency over treating the guests well; reviews of the place occasionally mention that service was lacking and they seemed understaffed, but to the owner saving on labor and the FOH team getting the tips split fewer ways, they were “properly” staffed. I’ve seen understaffing at places that I have worked that cut from 3 to 2 bartenders, and the servers just had to deal with 30+ minute ticket times because one bartender was running around dealing with 22 seats plus standing guests waiting for tables and couldn’t assist the service bartender getting slammed with tickets during the dinner rush (and couldn’t help the rail bartender deal with guests either).

It’s gotten to the point I no longer go out for cocktails much anymore and make them at home (I used to go out 2-3x per week back in the day) both for the lack of warm hospitality and the rising costs. When I do go out, it’s to not-award-winning programs but ones that make me feel taken care of and have food at a reasonable price.

I have not seen a drink minimum though save for comedy clubs though. I did have a one drink minimum when I went to see my old barback play jazz at a club (Wally’s in Boston) which served as the cover charge, and even with tip, it was under $10.

[EvanD]

@martin

This, at a hotel lobby bar.

I remember as a musician it used to be you lost money touring, but it boosted album sales; now, you never get paid for your music and you have to make it up with tours…. Is this a similar case, where the hotel is ancillary to the bar’s revenue stream now?

[francois]

@EvanD

Is this a similar case, where the hotel is ancillary to the bar’s revenue stream now?

Hotels revenue is always coming from rooms. When it comes to their bars, hotels have three choices:

• Have a bar under sufferance (need one, don’t want one)
• Use it the same way they use fine dining restaurants (we’ll lose money on the bar but its fame will drive up room rates)
• Run them as they’ve always run them —guests expect bars, we want to please guests so we run decent bars and if we have have non guest drinking here, amazing.

I think Martin’s experience is part of the overall confusion, where hospitaly venues don’t quite know what their objective clientele want.

[martin]

Over the last year or so, I’ve run face-first into some variation of the following with disheartening frequency:

Closed for a private event. We apologize for any inconvenience.

In New York, this is beginning to feel epidemic. Some restaurants and bars (e.g., The Grill) can now be fairly described as honoring their regular hours only if they haven’t managed to book a buyout.

Few businesses make any effort to warn their would-be regulars, or have any clear channel to do so. The inevitable consequence is anti-hospitality. It is really fucking inconvenient to arrive somewhere you have every reason to expect to be open for business only to find that it is not. Weasel words are no consolation.

I understand that many restaurant and bar owners “cannot afford to pass up” these opportunities, so this (maybe-) trend is symptomatic of overarching economic malaise. However, at some tipping point, the mission has shifted, possibly irrevocably, and a business is not only tenuous, but unreliable, and unworthy of patronage.

[BeerAndAShot]

I’ve run into that in DC and NOLA as well. It is especially frustrated when it’s not posted on their website, meaning you get all the way to the restaurant/bar you’ve been looking forward to (and, perhaps, asked friends to meet you at) just to be turned away at the door.

I know these events are probably good money for them but when that happens I’m that much less likely to come back ever. For instance, locally this has happened to me multiple times at The Sovereign, and while Your Only Friend and McClellan’s Retreat both have regular buyouts, they are good about notifying social media/etc. so it’s not a surprise.

[CurrerBachman]

Also confirmed from Chicago, Three Dots and a Dash does this often (also Civil Liberties in Toronto but only once to me). I assume it makes sense financially but if you’re not following their social media then you’re screwed.

[martin]

Hit an innovative new low, last night, at a mid-to-high-end New York City restaurant (Hav & Mar).

When it came time to pay the bill, we were presented with a plastic tablet emblazoned with a QR code and the restaurant’s logo. Scanning the QR code with a phone led to a web site for reviewing and paying the bill. Making the payment with a credit card went smoothly and predictably enough, and led to a “rate your experience” widget with a row of five stars to tap on.

It gets much worse, but right off the bat, I would say this is a problem. I could insert an essay here as to why, but the short of it is that as soon as you outsource this source of question to an automatic form, you have significantly shifted the nature of the customer relationship and colored the experience up to that point.

Dutifully—but with new misgivings—tapping five stars immediately produced… a new fucking survey form with many questions scrolling right off the bottom of the screen of the phone. A (hopefully) enjoyable social meal has now literally concluded with bureaucratic paperwork. This is not nothing. Sure, as POS systems (point-of-sale, also piece of shit) try to collect customer feedback at every retail opportunity on the planet, we learn to compartmentalize it, but that only works to a point. Moreover, a good restaurant is different from a hardware store or even a coffee kiosk: all that work to design and cultivate a rewarding customer experience is risked or even squandered for this?

Wait, it gets worse.

After hunting for, and eventually finding, a way to bypass this unwelcome new intrusion, the transaction is concluded. And then we realize that we have just been charged a $5 service fee for paying our bill by the vendor that is handling this payment system on behalf of the restaurant.

Everything about this is not just unnecessary, stupid, and insulting, but suicidal. There will be blowback, but I wanted to document this experience here, because (at least to me) it represents a new frontier that is upon us. Parasites have been draining the hospitality from the industry for years, and it’s obvious that the restaurants are worse off. We’re all losing. Double down!

edit: the parasite at the heart of this fiasco is https://sundayapp.io

[GoodSpiritsNews]

That is an annoying total bunch of shit from a place where you should expect more than a fucking survey like you’d get from DoorDash.