It is 4:30 p.m. on a recent Saturday, with only a handful of shopping days left before Christmas. The 380 tables inside Maggiano’s eatery in the Oakbrook Center are full.
There are about 100 people on the waiting list for a table. Estimated wait: 45 minutes.
Ground zero is the host stand, where the crowds huddle hoping to get seated, as soon as possible, please. It’s a scene that is played out at popular city and suburban restaurants throughout the year, but it intensifies during the holidays when getting a table without a reservation — or with a reservation, for that matter — can be a challenge.
“Debbie F. Party of four,” a voice booms from the intercom.
While some of the waiting customers have gone off to browse nearby stores, others insist on waiting at the host stand, persistently checking on the status of their reservations and regularly scooping up handfuls of the multicolored candies sitting in a small bowl.
“We have to feed you as soon as you get here. We’re Italians,” laughs Christi Granato, as she refills the bowl.
Granato is indeed Italian. She is also the restaurant’s hostess, the first person people approach when they work their way to the hostess stand. She will take their name and give them a waiting time. She’ll track the crowds. That makes her a cross between a diplomat, comedian and traffic cop. Were she to give up the hostess job, she’d have the skills needed to referee pro-wrestling matches. These days, though, she is ringmaster for the circus in front of her, the jam-packed entryway of Maggiano’s restaurant.
The space is roughly the size of two SUVs. It is jammed with waiting customers, their body sizes doubled by hyper-inflated down jackets and furs. There are babies in strollers and frail grandmothers. Vying for the limited space are mammoth shopping bags from Saks, J. Crew, Neiman-Marcus and Williams-Sonoma.
“Wexler. Party of six,” announces Granato over the intercom. “Wexler. Party of six.”
Granato and maitre d’ Jean Pierre Lutz, the man who seats guests as their names are called and oversees the action in the dining room, study the lists — one for those with reservations, one for “walk-ins,” those who show up without reservations. They juggle tables using different colored markers to keep track of it all, those who cancel and those who change the size of their party at the last minute.
A basketball game is on the television in the bar. Conversations and tunes from the piano bar are interrupted by cell phone chatter. The air is perfumed by garlic, after-shave and a splash of tension.
“We know that when the restaurant is full it’s going to take 1 1/2 to 2 hours. With the holidays, it’s going to take longer,” Granato says. “If we’re running behind, I’ll say, `I’m sorry, but we’re doing the best we can.’ Then I show them where the bathrooms are, the coat check, the piano bar.”
Clutching a clipboard, she heads out into the crowd, attempting to figure out who has just arrived and who is just standing there in a daze.
“I just got body slammed,” laughs Granato, returning to the stand after getting sideswiped by one of those shopping bags.
It’s time for Granato, who has worked as a hostess for more than a dozen years, to huddle with maitre d’ Lutz, a Frenchman from Calais who arrived in Oakbrook via work on the Orient Express and at the now-shuttered Crickets. “People won’t wait in Europe,” he confides.
Things don’t improve much when at 4:45 p.m., Granato advises walk-ins that the next available seating is between 7 and 7:15 p.m. — a roughly 2 1/2-hour wait. Enter the Faso party, a group of 10 that made reservations four weeks ago, and includes an elderly woman who needs a chair because of recent foot surgery. In the mix is a couple who decides the table they were just seated at is too near the smoking section.
And there is Marvin Marshall of Oak Park. He and his wife, Erika, wanted spaghetti. They called the downtown Maggiano’s (“They were jammed,” he says.) and the Oakbrook location. “At 4, we were told it would be 1 1/2 hours,” Marshall says. They arrived in Oakbrook to find an even more imposing wait. “We were a little peeved,” he says.
Maggiano’s isn’t the only place, of course, where hostesses and hosts and maitre d’s are juggling tables as well as people’s expectations and their changing perception of time.
At the Marshall Field’s State Street store, the venerable Walnut Room has been drawing crowds since 1907. For lunchtime visits during the holiday season — or during special store promotions — Vivian Lee, who supervises the 38 hosts and hostesses there, says waits can stretch to 2 1/2 hours. No surprise — they sometimes serve up to 4,000 people daily. She recalls that in years past, the wait sometimes reached five hours for a seat near the tree. For the last three years, beepers handed out to waiting customers have helped make waiting more manageable.
“We came the day after Thanksgiving and it was mobbed. We looked at the crowd and left,” says Chicagoan Joanie Sauers, who with husband Kyle and 2-month-old son Maxwell returned a few weeks before Christmas and found the 45-minute wait more manageable. Good thing, because it’s a family tradition — she has been coming to the Walnut Room with her mom at Christmas since she was a child.
Ten-year-old Kevin Walsh showed up for the annual visit with his family — mom Chris; sisters Therese and Eva, both 7; Jamey, 4; and grandmother Terri Mansell, all from Chicago — “for the snowman,” he explains, an ice cream creation he orders every year. The family also has a line-management plan: “We put Nana in line.”
While the Walsh family’s grandmother was in line, other grandmas in their holiday best perch on chairs at the Walnut Room’s entrance. Two dozen empty strollers lined up near the escalators allow more people to stand in the stanchion-edged line.
Why are people willing to endure such waits?
“This is tradition,” Lee says. “Their mother’s mother brought them here. And for some, the wait is just as much a tradition as being in the room. Some pack survival kits, walkie-talkies and books. They bring folding chairs.”
Waits for tables may be a tradition at the Walnut Room, or a “badge of honor” at popular eateries, but it can be a headache for those charged with managing the crowds, often a mix of people who have no problem waiting and people for whom time is their master.
“We live in an impatient society,” says Rich Melman, whose Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises group includes the Maggiano’s restaurants.
“Everything is so instantaneous these days. Our expectations are so different these days than when our parents brought us,” says Marshall Field’s spokeswoman Lynne Galia. “I think it’s a function of technology. It has changed people’s perceptions and attitudes.”
It’s those attitudes that sometimes clash when customers are confronted with long waits at popular restaurants. And it’s the host and hostess — the first person to greet you when you enter some restaurant’s door — who must deal with it. In many restaurants, there will be a host or hostess who greets the customer and handles the door while a maitre d’ seats the guests.
“If it’s working, the maitre d’ is working hand in hand with the hostess,” says Mark Tormey, president of the 13-unit Maggiano’s division, which puts its hosts and hostesses through a week of training. “In a smaller restaurant, they can be one in the same.”
And that can compound problems, say those in the industry, when a hostess or host must balance greeting customers with answering phones, taking reservations and seating customers.
No matter what arrangement a restaurant has at its door, candidates for hostess or host need to possess a sense of humor, a friendly personality and the patience of Job.
“They’ve got to have personality, be caring and be ready to accommodate,” says Kathy O’Malley, supervisor of hostesses at Gibsons Steakhouse on Rush Street (and no relation to the WGN radio personality), where the 189-seat restaurant serves 500 to 600 people a night.
“You have to love people, be extremely outgoing and friendly,” says Granato, noting the only downside is that she sometimes loses her voice after saying, “We’ll be serving you shortly” and, “Please try us again” for seven hours.
“The toughest part is to teach people timing,” says the Walnut Room’s Lee, of the need to gauge the line as well as the time it takes a table to turn over — that is, to change from one party to the next.
“We talk about problem solving, anticipating guests reaction and forming a reaction to the reaction,” says Philip Papineau, associate dean for table service at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. “The thing most overlooked is the importance of learning to listen, to be sympathetic. [Customers] have a problem and they want to be heard.”
“I think the biggest complaint [we get] is that people are rude at the front desk,” says Melman. “That they are not caring enough, that [customers] are just another number. . . . That first impression [in a restaurant] is much like meeting a person in real life. It sticks with people.”
“The pressure of this job is that the waiter or waitress gets to say `yes’ to the customer 10 times. Yes to ketchup, yes to coffee. The hostess says the `nos,'” says Tormey. “They must be able to say no in a nice way over and over and over.”
Another dynamic, Tormey says, “is that almost every restaurant you’re greeted with a waiter or waitress who gets to say yes and gets directly compensated” with tips. Hosts and hostesses at restaurants do not take tips, and are paid on a different scale than waiters and waitresses.
“We have fired maitre d’s for selling tables,” says Tormey. (Note that most restaurateurs say there is no problem with customers tipping a maitre d’ after a special service has been provided.)
Sometimes customers don’t realize some restaurants won’t seat partial parties for several reasons (including it’s difficult to locate people in mammoth eateries once they’re seated and not because they want you to drink up in the bar). Or that restaurants keep a certain percentage of tables open for walk-in customers. And that things can go wrong — at both ends of the equation: People don’t show up for reservations. Others dawdle at their table. Problems arise in the kitchen. Waiters don’t show up.
Generally, say restaurateurs, they want to make their customers happy. If waits extend, say 15 to 30 minutes, beyond a reservation time the restaurant may try to compensate for that.
“I think there has to be absolute honesty on the part of the maitre d’ or hostess,” Papineau says. “If someone is told one hour, they should be held to that.”
Hosts and hostesses, of course, will forgive your sins too. Like those who make reservations at a half-dozen places, then show up at only one. Or those who are told the wait is 30 minutes — then check in with the hostess every 10. Or those who eyeball the reservation list, picking a name off it and claiming it as their own.
Or those who attempt to dazzle the desk with dollars.
“When someone is waving a $100 bill,” O’Malley says, “I tell them we have great food and great service and we don’t sell tables.”
Finally, those in the restaurant business note that not everyone seeking room at a table are chanting the season’s “peace on earth, goodwill to all” mantra. Polite is not in their vocabulary.
“The closer you get to the holidays, the more upset people get,” says Tony Garcia, one of Maggiano’s managers. “They leave shopping. They’re hungry. They’re cranky. They come here.”
“People are much less tolerant these days,” Papineau says. “People are very empowered. They feel that they can say what they want and when they want to say it. It’s a highly competitive world. They are outspoken, they know they have rights. It can make for arrogance. It’s always been there, but now it’s more visible.”
And while hosts and hostesses generally put up with a lot, there is one line never crossed: Customers who use profanity or yell.
There was, for example, the woman who showed up at Maggiano’s and went ballistic, emptying her arsenal of four-letter words on Granato. The woman’s gripe? She had been told there would be an hour wait — and 45 minutes had passed. “I’ve had grownups throw tantrums worse than a 2-year-old,” Granato says.
At Field’s Walnut Room recently, one customer’s rant ended when a manager pulled him aside and tried to calm him down . . . to the applause of those waiting in line.
When such things happen, a manager will generally intervene.
Has there been a jump in grumpy patrons?
“It’s been the same for a long time,” Melman says. “I think there are 5 percent of the people who can be irritating and 5 percent who can be wonderful and 80 to 90 percent of the people probably fall between those high marks.”
HOW TO CHOOSE THE HOST/HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST
Those in the industry agree that not everyone is host or hostess material.
Just ask them to relate their own horror stories of standing by while a host or hostess stares blankly at guests or spends more time chatting up waiters than getting you to a table. Polite may be a foreign expression.
“Those people have a problem being in service,” says the Culinary Institute of America’s Philip Papineau. “They want to be at the door and it is a great place. But what they really want to be is on the other side of the hostess desk.”
So what do restaurateurs look for in a good host or hostess? A pretty face or a psych major?
“I pick them on ability and what I need. Somebody who is really positive and upbeat and likes to deal with people. Someone who remembers names and is detail oriented. That’s what I look for,” says Lettuce Entertain You’s Rich Melman. “Now, some places the most important thing is how the person looks. There is something to be said for that. . . . You want someone who’ll represent you and that will be different at (R.J.) Grunts or at Tru or at Ambria. There should be some continuity so that the people who greet you fit the place.”
“I tell them, `Be the host of the party. Dress like you’re the hostess at the party. Don’t become emotional,” says Patrick D’Andrea, general manager for Maggiano’s in Oakbrook Center.
“Psychologically, it really is important first and foremost for the person to be very nice,” says Maggiano’s president Mark Tormey. “We need to pick people who are nice. Maybe they can’t quote the New York Times, but we find pressure rolls off them.”
