Electronic Writer

Believe it, or not, fine dining has seasons. During the summer time, when the default meal is to barbeque and be outside with friends, upscale restaurants are filled with bored food servers who are pleasantly surprised if the night gets busy. Friday and Saturday nights of the summertime will find the same restaurant staffed by blood-thirsty waiters trying to squeeze every penny out of every table to compensate for the slow nights the rest of the season. By contrast, as the weather reaches lower and lower temperatures outside, you will find higher and higher numbers of recreational diners inside. There is a direct correlation between temperature and the amount business in restaurants.

Certain holidays, however, mark the exceptions to the seasons. They are the sudden heat wave in the middle of winter. The mid-July snow. Of all the Holidays on the calendar, there is one perched aloft the highest pinnacle of painfulness. From a food server’s perspective, Valentine’s Day is simply the most foul of all the holidays.

This particular holiday falls in the middle of the dining high season. So, first of all, it spoils what would usually be a good night. The calendar year, however, determines the actual evening, and while there are no good nights to stage one of these Valentine’s Day “celebrations,” it is usually best if it falls on either a Sunday or Monday night–the slowest nights of the week.

This is the point where you ask, “What makes Valentine’s Day so awful?” Quite simply, it is the people. Middle America opens its gates for one evening of every year, and out spills a huge throng of people who never dine, who watch television from the big-screen TVs in their living rooms, and who order delivered pizzas to eat while watching rented movies as a part of a typical Friday night. While there is nothing wrong with those activities, there is, however, a fundamental problem with the idea of Valentine’s Day. It forces all of the people who are comfortable with those activities to put on a tie, or perhaps a skirt, and go out to an expensive restaurant where they have to pay to have someone park their car, pay four times more money for their dinner than if they had just ordered a pizza, never get enough food of their plate for all the money they are spending, and have them sit in that “stuffy” restaurant for hours upon hours. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Let’s take a peek at the hostess stand for a moment. Regardless of the day of the week, there are 600% more reservations than the restaurant normally seats on any given evening. A large percentage of them have been made by crafty guys who have made similar reservations at three other restaurants at 1-hour intervals in case they are running a bit late. The location is invariably “a surprise,” so they can take their dates/girlfriends and boyfriends /wives/mistresses to whichever of the three locations is the most convenient. Regardless of the drop-off rate, the Valentine’s Day reservations reach alarming proportions from the perspective of the restauranteur.

In response to the sheer suggestion of those kind of reservations, every employee the restaurant has ever employed is working that night. All of the part-timers who have “real” jobs and who are trying to quit the addictive cash-in-the-pocket-rush of waiting tables are scheduled weeks in advance to take a temporary hiatus from their twelve-step programs to return for just this one night. The normal wait-staff are locked into a closed-room meeting and flatly ordered to attend. No vacations. No plans. No excuses. If, for any reason, sickness-included, they decide to be absent on Valentine’s Day, they will not have a job when they return.

Once the diners arrive, the real fun begins. They grumble as they pay to have someone park their car. They grumble when they realize that even WITH their reservations, they are going to have to wait 10 minutes for their table to be ready. They grumble that the two drinks that they ordered while waiting cost almost $15. They grumble as they peruse the menu to see the prices on the steak–the one menu item that doesn’t have French words in the description. They grumble at all the other people standing around them grumbling in the exact same ways about the exact same things.

Meanwhile the staff is grumbling because there are 300 parties of two, and not a single table of four (twice the tip money for the same amount of time). They are grumbling because their dates/girlfriends and boyfriends /wives/mistresses are at home watching chick-flicks and complaining because their Valentines are at work on the “one night of the year” when they are supposed to do something special for them. The staff is grumbling because they watch the diners’ eyes travel over to the price column on every item of the menu. They know the restaurant will sell out of the cheapest wine, as well as the menu items without any French words in the description. And, the staff is grumbling because every guest will want to stay for twenty extra minutes. After all, when was the last time they had spent this much money on dinner.

When posed with that question, my guess would always be . . . last year, on Valentine’s Day.