Dan Mayer

Dinner Boxing

Dining at a restaurant is a normal, nice, and relaxing evening for many people. Dining out at nice restaurants involves interactions between those eating out and the serving staff at the restaurant. The interactions at most fine dinning establishments have expected norms. These norms include ordering, eating, commenting on the food, tipping and other interactions. During my dinning experience at the Full Moon Grill, a gourmet restaurant in boulder, I violated some of these norms. A nicer dinning establishment was necessary to have the required expected interactions.

The norms in restaurants vary with the quality of the restaurant. The actions I took at the Full Moon Grill wouldn't violate norms of many “fast food” or “family dinning” restaurants. Fast food places and carry out restaurants expect that many times customers will order food and have it boxed up so they may leave. Fine dinning restaurants expect that the customer is their not only for the food, but for a nice relaxing dinning experience. Asking a gourmet restaurant to box each of the sequential courses without touching anything is not generally expected. In this case it violated the norms of expected business interactions.

As each course came out my dinner party wouldn't touch the food, but would continue polite conversation up until the time the serve would ask how everything was. Each time the server would ask about the food, we would ask for it to be boxed and continue conversation until the next course arrived. This at first was questioned by our waitress, “Box this already?” We responded that we had ordered too much and we were saving room for the other courses. After not touching the second course the waitress was noticeably uncomfortable.

During this part of the dinner all of the employees of the restaurant had been looking at us. Our waitress was talking quietly with others by the bar and motioning towards us. By the time the main course had arrived the bus boys were filling our drinks without looking at us, and slamming down water glasses faster than normal. Our table still didn't touch anything on the main course plates, which were served without much of a word. Normally after each course is delivered, a server returns to ask if everything is alright or if anything is needed. This same norm had occurred with our other courses.

The main courses sat as we chatted across the table with the employees giving us looks once and awhile. After a great deal of time, about thirty minutes, our waitress finally came around and asked in a polite manner, “Would you like these boxed also?” We responded with “yes could you please box these and could we see a dessert menu.” Our waitress that at this point seemed to give up and realize we were being perfectly polite and decent and there was no reason to not be polite back. Waiting over thirty minutes before a server even comes to ask if you need anything is an abnormal occurrence at fine dinning establishments.

Our waitress returned with a dessert menu and finally returned to making the common chit chat between waitress and costumer. She even took the time to make recommendations and explain some of the desserts. We ordered desserts and by this time it was as if we had returned to a normal dinning experience. Our waitress had begun to normalize our actions at the restaurant. She decided that if we were acting as if there was nothing abnormal she would do the same. There was only one small difference before we left.

We asked for the desserts to be boxed and for the check. We were aware that the check was brought out before all of our boxed food. This is probably a safety measure. Making sure two young students who had ordered and expensive meal weren't planning on ditching the bill. This wasn't done impolitely, and can be thought of as a necessary precaution. With this we left the restaurant with a more normal tip, to assure no unnecessary anger.

Originally the staff tried to reinforce the normal behavior of eating at the restaurant, with polite questions and odd looks. Then the reinforcement attempts became a little strong with ignoring our service and the rushed beverage fillings. The staff finally moved to normalization, acting as if nothing was odd about our dinning experience at all. The reactions were never to strong or harsh, but were definitely noticeable as non-standard meal.

The feelings invoked within me and my guest, were actually the strongest and most unexpected. Violating the expected behaviors with the knowledge that we were behaving incorrectly led to a heavy uneasiness. My guest and I discussed how awkward, wrong, and impolite doing this violation made us feel. Many times through out the meal I believe we were more worried ourselves of the behavior than was the staff. These feeling made it painfully obvious how well instilled day to day social interactions are embedded in who we are. Simply interactions like waiting in line, answering the phone, or waving to a friend are so robotic that it feels unnatural to not follow the norm.

The norms of business interactions themselves are important and our society structure is reliant on the fact that people pay for goods and services. If people just stole and used items before paying for them the economy would collapse. The difference is we violated a business interaction that wouldn't result in any problems for society. It isn't necessary to restaurants for costumers to eat at the restaurant. It isn't necessary to consumers to only eat out of their home. This is more a norm as it is part of the fine dinning experience. Most people go to finer restaurants to talk, relax, and enjoy the atmosphere. The experience was changed from a way to spend time while eating to just a way to spend time. Norms like this are created more from the expectations the restaurant believe you have when eating out.

A norm in society doesn't always have to be something necessary to societies functioning. Many norms only serve to reinforce politeness and common interactions so that many situations may be dealt with quickly. Such as most services expecting payment after the service. If every store found a different time and method for payment transactions would be slower and more complicated. This also holds true for norms of answering phones, raising a hand in class, or knocking on a door. These norms aren't established as necessary roles in society, but more for convenience sake. This is one reason why violation of this norm brings more confusion than anger.

The reactions to violating this norm could have been much different. In fact if we weren't well mannered and well dressed the staff would have probably had a bias against us. Generally our demeanor while in the restaurant led the staff to treat us differently than they would have treated someone who was acting out and having everything boxed. We probably would have been kicked out before the almost two hours we were there. This is an example of differential social power.

As with, The Saints and Roughnecks by William J. Chambliss we were treated differently based on our assumed social status. While in our violation we would no lease visible with the act itself. We were less visible to the other costumers in the restaurant since we were well dressed and mannered. The bias towards us was also probably advantageous since from our actions and interactions that it was obvious we were accustomed to fine dinning. If it had appeared we weren't accustomed to eating at this type of restaurant it would have probably drawn more concern about our boxing of food or likely hood to stiff the bill. Stated in the introduction by the Adler's, “the power of social class can operate to facilitate the definition of some groups as deviant and others as not.” (Patricia A. Adler, 2003, Peter Adler, 2003, p.169) Obviously the power of social class helped us violate this norm without dealing with to many issues.

Violating this norm had different effects than I had anticipated. Violating a norm such as this was met more with reactions to our demeanor than to our violation. The violation led to more stress and uneasiness to us committing the violation than to the staff reacting to it. Our violation was accepted and normalized before leaving the restaurant. It was probably a funny story for our waitress by the time we left. My guest and I were so nervous that we decided to drive home to use the restroom instead of staying at the restaurant another minute. The over all experience was a good lesson in the fact that norms not only exists as the actions we choose to do, but they are a part of who we are. The way we are raised and accustomed to acting through out our lives has a big impact on how we will act in our future. What we have done in the past will dictate what we are comfortable with in the future. A simple norm is much more of who you are than you can possibly imagine.

Works Cited

Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, Constructions of Deviance, 2003. Wadsworth Group.