A Great Restaurant’s Secret Ingredient

Chefs make news just like any other celebrity. We hear about it all: The one who moved into a bigger place, the one who favors wild striped bass, the one who would like the world to know that he has a new theory about eggplant.

When Jar, a West Hollywood shrine for carnivores, went through three front-room managers in less than a year, though, the news never rose above industry scuttlebutt. The front of the house--everything in a restaurant but the food--is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme. When it’s good, it’s very, very good, and when it’s bad, the customers simply don’t come back.

In addition to attitude as smooth as a veloute, the front of the house includes all the things you don’t notice unless they displease you: The temperature of the room, the color of the walls, the lighting, the soundtrack, the wait staff’s uniforms, the way the host greets you and seats you, the pacing of the service.

What seems like a seamless environment, when it works right, is, in fact, the result of endless planning and preparation. An offhanded inquiry about how you like the tamarind sauce is part of an almost military strategy, based on a deceptively simple question: “What can we do,” says Jar co-owner Suzanne Tracht, “to make you happy?”

The less obvious the effort, the better. Lucques co-owner and front-room maven Carolyne Styne, a short, slender blond whose drive matches the buzz in her main dining room, strives for what she calls “invisible service--everything’s taken care of, and the customer never had to ask for it.” She doesn’t just happen by after the entrees are served. It’s a conscious decision not to bother people too soon, and not to wait so long that she can’t solve a problem.

Mark Peel, an owner of Campanile, quotes “The Wizard of Oz” to define his service philosophy: “ ‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.’ ” Illusion is key.

In the old days, most restaurateurs paid far less attention to what went on in the front of the house, according to Peel, who worked at Ma Maison more than 20 years ago. “At Ma Maison, it was, ‘Service? They’re carrying plates to the table,’ ” he says. The ones who did--Valentino, Spago and a handful of others--were legendary exceptions. “But in many ways service is more important than the food, now. Think of all the places with mediocre food and great service, and they’re packed--because people feel welcome, taken care of, and they can get what they want.”

When every self-respecting restaurant seems to have a seasonal heirloom tomato salad on the menu, the “out” in “dining out” becomes more important. The restaurant business has come to bear an odd resemblance to the automotive industry: If there are tons of great meals out there, just as there are tons of luxury sedans, then the difference--a restaurant’s brand identity--is in how you serve what you serve. In a business with a high mortality rate, in an economy that does not smile on extravagance, the way the customer feels is a make-or-break issue.

Tracht is a tiny, tailored woman with a peaceable air--an unlikely adversary for a man with a big knife. But there he was, an irate customer waving his cutlery at a waiter. Tracht knew she had to do something. No matter how impossible a customer gets, the staff stays gracious. An apology, and a quick retreat, did the trick. “I can fix the food, cold potatoes, a burned steak,” she says, “but not rude service. People will go tell 12 friends and never come back.”

Tracht’s main dining room exudes a flattering reserve, from the noncommittal chairs (Are they gray or green?) to a peachy light that makes everyone look 10 years younger. The linens are white, the wood accents are pale; the whole place whispers quality. There is no room here for histrionics, neither from customers nor from the staff.

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Attentive but Restrained

The front of the house always has a personality, just like the kitchen does. For a while, in the ‘80s, front rooms were full of ingratiating waiters. (Hi. I’m Bob. I’m going to help you chew your food.) In the ‘90s, there were the power waiters and wine folk who could keep pace with the most can-you-top-this demands. These days, restaurants aspire to a more restrained, but ever-helpful kind of service: attentive but not overbearing, informed but not about to tell you which side of the road the tomatoes grew on, concerned from a respectful distance about the customer’s contentment. If there is one consistent indicator of the current dining gestalt, it is the music that plays in otherwise very different dining rooms around the city:

“World music,” says Bonnie Beck, who has been the manager at Jar for three months.

“World music,” says Styne.

“World music,” says Dana Caskey, co-owner of the House, in Hollywood, which feels like a boho graduate-school cousin to the other, sleeker spots. No matter what the trappings, the message, these days, is cosmic calm.

Even the way you wait for your table is part of the orchestrated experience. There was a time when waiting an hour was a heady part of dining out; the very fact that customers were stacked at the bar like airplanes waiting for takeoff meant that this must be the place to be. No more. If a patron has to wait at all, the front room staff tries to make it as much fun as possible.

Lucques was designed around the inevitability of waiting, with what Styne calls the “living-room area,” a rectangle of overstuffed couches and chairs at the center of the dining room. A good thing, since the dining room tends to fill at a reasonable pace from 6 p.m. to about 8, and then, as though the extras had been called to the set, people begin to pour in. The first onslaught occupies the living room, and the second wave stands four deep at the bar, waiting for their drinks to be passed to them over other people’s heads.

It works so well that some customers are disappointed if they don’t have to hang out, or if their favorite couch is taken. Lucques’ owners have conspired, from the exposed brick to the warm walls, to make customers feel “hugged by the room,” according to Styne, and no one wants to feel left out.

At Jar, Tracht’s goal is to whisk people to their tables as quickly as humanly possible. She and Beck have studied the rhythm of the room. They know that people eat in 60 to 90 minutes on Saturday nights, because they want to make a movie or a party, but that the meals on Friday nights can take more than two hours; people who show up on Fridays see the meal as the evening’s activity. So they book fewer parties on Fridays and hope for the best: no more than 15 minutes from greeting to seating.

If it doesn’t work, they avoid what Beck calls “the hypoglycemic moment” with a free drink and appetizer at the long, curved bar. A hungry customer is a cranky customer; no one is allowed to linger without a snack, let alone bump their elbows on a right angle.

There are times, though, when even food won’t do it. Some customers feel the need to prove how important they are by announcing, loudly, that they do not wait. Ever.

“You have to interact with them constantly,” Beck says, “give them updates, tell them, ‘They’re just paying the check,’ so they don’t feel anxious. What you don’t want is to be pretentious--to make them feel lucky that they have a table at all.”

Even the host’s clothing reflects the theme. Styne and Beck wore skirts over cigarette pants on a recent evening, but Styne’s was a hip, crisp little scarf with aspirations and Beck’s was a floaty Zen number that fit with the liquid decor.

Caskey, who co-owns he House with chef Scooter Kanfer and came to hospitality by way of corporate jobs in steel and technology, handles the front room at the House even though he admits that he still gets the Jacks--Nicklaus and Nicholson--mixed up. He figures it’s an advantage, since big shots might like a quiet meal once in a while, just like everyone else.

“When Meryl Streep comes in--and she did,” he says, with a note of pride, “I don’t want everyone falling all over themselves. Have a level of comfort that’s equal.”

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Everyone Gets Prepped

Everyone has to be prepared for surprises. Caskey admits that he’s working with a “volatile genius” in Kanfer, and he wants diners to appreciate that “she puts a little bit of her soul onto every plate.” So the partners play with the environment just to keep people primed for the unexpected: mismatched flatware, comic nicknames for many of the regular dishes and an eagerness, among the wait staff, that just might convince a diner to try something out of the ordinary. Nobody bothered to overhaul the old house that houses the House--they just painted it, put nice little shades on the light fixtures, and stepped back to let the food shine.

It is all an illusion. The inclusive feel of Lucques, the Zen of meat at Jar, the grad school goofiness at the House, are all a piece of performance art--and the staff, the actors, work from a careful script.

Really effortless service, whether formal or casual, requires endless attention to detail. Once you’re at your table (and if you’re a regular, your table preference is probably in the computer along with other salient facts), the waiter approaches having survived an audition to get the job, days of shadowing a more experienced employee, and quite possibly a written test to make sure he or she can tell you the temperature to which your roast pork will be cooked.

Campanile has a “service meeting” every night before dinner begins, and the agenda always includes a breakdown of the evening’s reservations, to see who’s sitting where, and which VIPs are on the roster. At the House, Caskey and Kanfer interview all prospective servers, and then Caskey monitors them, to make sure the “smile factor” is always there.

As in any family, there are rivalries; the person who runs the front has to make sure that the members of the staff, as well as the customers, are happy. “In general there’s an innate jealousy on the part of the wait staff,” Beck says, “because the people in the kitchen are hidden from all the problems we have in the front of the house.”

Peel, who has spent his working life in the kitchen, watches for resentments from the other side. “The kitchen thinks, those waiters, they walk around in clean clothes, they never sweat, they make a lot of money writing down orders.”

And then there are the customers who resent it if they feel they are not getting as much attention as someone else is. “When a server spends too much time with a table because they’re regulars, or personal friends,” says Tracht, “it’s noticeable to the other customers. They get jealous, like children--and they’re right. It’s rude.”

Whoever runs the front of the house, whether an owner or a manager, quickly learns that it is a calling, not a job. Styne and her partner, Suzanne Goin, decided not to close their restaurant for a vacation this summer; between that and getting ready to open a second restaurant in November, Styne had no home life. She finally gave herself a day-and-a-half off so that she could play with her daughter before kindergarten began, and mentions more than once how lucky she is to have a husband who loves the restaurant.

Caskey fairly lives at the House, allowing himself “a couple of hours” in the morning and before the dinner rush to keep up an exercise regimen. And Beck lets out a laugh about her life, or lack of it. “I do everything,” she says. “Catering, marketing, staff and scheduling, correspondence, parties here and off site, troubleshooting all day long,” in addition to being at Jar from 6 to 10, five nights a week.

All that, just to make strangers feel happy for a couple of hours, strangers who will likely go home thinking that the chocolate caramel tart is the cause of their bliss. A great front-room person is not in it for the recognition; they have what Styne calls an “innate co-dependent need to serve.” In the tradition of people who are nice for a living, neither she nor Peel nor Beck will say exactly what went wrong with Beck’s predecessors, except that they were not quite prepared to play that kind of part.