The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [56]
“This is the big thing,” he tells the class. “You want to make money. You’re not here just for the glory. You’re in business. The more you sell, the better it is—for you, for the house, for everybody. I want to shock you about this: don’t forget who goes home at the end of the day. It’s your plate and nobody else’s. Will it be full or not?”
Philippe never lets a customer choose his own table. “They go to my table, the one I give to them. Even if their name is Forbes or Nixon, they go where I put them. But you always make it look like you give them the best. You want to keep them under control, always keep them under control. That’s the main thing. You are playing the game, and they are in the game. You reverse that and you’ll have problems.”
Philippe doesn’t waste his charm on regular customers familiar with the menu and habituated to the glamour of dining at La Clique. But of couples like the doctor and his wife, who are honored to be here and look around the room at the billionaires and socialites, he says, “You can do whatever you want with them—they are Play-Doh in your hands.”
He never lets the customer read the menu for more than four or five minutes. “I have already made up my mind that the doctor and his wife are going to have something from me today, not just anything from the menu.” Be light and evasive, he advises, and then “at the moment they don’t expect, be very precise: ‘I recommend something very strongly today. As a main course you have to try the bouillabaisse.’ You say it as if there is nothing else on the menu, as though everybody eats the bouillabaisse, as though it will hurt everybody if they don’t have it. But say it nice.” Then Philippe casually asks the doctor and his wife if they would like some salad, as though it comes free with the meal. “This works many, many times,” he tells us.
When Philippe is taking the order, he stands very close to the table. As Karen MacNeil later explains, “When you want something to happen, the closer you stand to the person, the more power you have.” When Philippe is clearing the dishes, he stands as far back as the length of his arm allows.
He never asks if his customers have any questions. If he is truly in control of the table and appears to be inviting questions, the customers will comply by dreaming some up. “Then you’re stuck at this table and there are seven other tables waiting. I see a lot of waiters do this—it’s absolutely crazy.”
As an exception to his general approach, Philippe never forces food on a customer simply because it is expensive. “I try to sell them mineral water, try to sell them more drinks, more wine, an expensive dessert. I pay a lot of attention to how much a bottle of wine costs. But with food I never go by the price. That is something you have to sacrifice because it’s too obvious. You should sell them food only if you are sure it will please them.”
Many restaurateurs instruct their waiters to bring the wine list to the table with or before the menus; this has been shown to increase wine sales, Karen tells us. But Philippe disagrees: “Ninety-nine percent of the time, people know if they are going to have wine or not. The wine list won’t change their minds. God knows I want to sell them wine. But the wine list is big and scary, and the customer will get confused.”
Philippe is a graceful waiter with impeccable training. This is taken for granted. His movements are balletic and weightless; his manner is airy and nonchalant. He has been drilled in the technical rules of service since his boyhood in France—he insists, for example, on removing the salt and pepper from the table after the main course to set the stage for