Perils of Valet Parking

“Dirty white shirt, tie pulled down, jacket dirty and too small, attitude deplorable, unshaven. . . . Do not restaurant owners know that a sloppy valet parker is a direct reflection on their restaurant?”

So writes attorney Robert M. Rosenthal of Los Angeles, regarding an attendant that he encountered recently outside a restaurant in Beverly Hills.

Rosenthal is distressed with the state of restaurant valet parking in general these days, he continues. “Whatever happened to the ‘welcome’ greeting--without a hand out?” he asks. “Whatever happened to the umbrella held by a parker when it is raining? Whatever happened to holding the car door open for the passenger before standing by the driver’s door to hand out the parking ticket?”

I suppose the answer to these last questions must ultimately be that such niceties of service have become as obsolete as the hotel that shines your shoes if you leave them outside your door overnight, the butcher who throws in a few beef bones for the Golden Retriever when you buy a rack of lamb and the guy at the filling station who dashes out smilingly to check the oil and water instead of glowering in a glass cage behind a “Pay Before Pumping” sign. Times have changed--and both mercantile generosity and courtly service, alas, are rare in this cost-efficient, hands-out age.

Rosenthal is dead on, though, when he notes that valet parkers are a reflection on the restaurants they serve. The first experience of a restaurant that a patron gets, Rosenthal points out, is usually an encounter with the parking attendant--an encounter he correctly states, that “will many times set the tone of the dinner.”

Very few restaurants employ their own parking attendants. Almost all are hired directly by firms specializing in parking services and offered to restaurants on a contract basis. I’ve written about the valet parking business in these pages before: I have sympathy for the problems valet companies face, and I have certainly encountered plenty of polite, hard-working, neatly dressed parking attendants in my daily (and nightly) rounds.

But I’ve also met slobs of the kind that Rosenthal describes, and suffered rudeness, minor auto damage and parking tickets at the hands of parkers who were supposedly doing me a “service.” When this has happened, I have usually complained to the management of the restaurant in question--and I recommend that anyone who has such problems do the same.

Restaurateurs always protest that they have no responsibility for the actions of the parking attendants they hire, nor any control over them. This is nonsense. A restaurateur has definitive control over parkers by virtue of the fact that he can fire them (or at least replace the company they work for with another firm).

And for a restaurateur to say that he has no responsibility for the attendants who park his customers’ cars because he doesn’t employ them directly is as silly as it would be for the chef to say that he has no responsibility for the quality of the fish he serves because he just buys the stuff.

Anyway, Rosenthal (an attorney, remember) reminds me that, despite the fact that they contract out their parking, restaurants retain the ultimate legal and financial responsibility for damages to cars or tickets received by cars under valet supervision. “I once got a ticket while at a restaurant after my car was parked by the valet,” he says. “I complained to the restaurant and was told that it was not their fault. Well, they learned differently after the court gave me a judgment against them for the $17 ticket, $265 costs, $500 general damages and interest at the rate of 10%. I sent them a thank-you note!”

HAMBURG AMERICAN-STYLE: German-born, L.A.-based chef Joachim Splichal (formerly of the Seventh Street Bistro and Max au Triangle, and now consulting at the private Regency Club in Westwood while putting together a restaurant deal of his own) is in Hamburg this week, participating in that city’s World Festival of Chefs.

Specifically, Splichal is cooking three multi-course dinners at the 2-star Le Canard. A sample menu of typically imaginative Splichal creations includes crab cakes with red bell pepper remoulade, hamburger (of course) of tuna with fried onion rings, Napoleon of Napa Valley duck liver with curly cabbage and shoestring potatoes and a trio of corn-based deserts--corn and apple tarte tatin , corn mousse with candied corn and almond tuile with corn ice cream.

About three-fourths of the raw materials he is using are American in origin, Splichal notes--”to demonstrate to the European audience the high quality of our food products here.”

ON THE TABLE: Monday’s a good day for wine dinners hereabouts, with the L.A. Chapter of the German Wine Society holding an Alsatian-German dinner at La Parisienne in Monrovia ($55 per person); the folks from Flora Springs turning up at the Parkway Grill in Pasadena with enough of their good wines to wash down a 5-course repast ($50); and wine maker Bill Henri of the William Hill Winery bringing three Chardonnays and three Cabernets to Monique in South Laguna for a 6-course meal ($65). . . .

As usual, a number of establishments in this area will observe St. Patrick’s Day Thursday with green beer and corned beef and cabbage and other non-Irish falderal, and as usual I refuse on principle to offer news of these goings on. But two local St. Patrick’s Day events are worth mentioning: Gilliland’s in Santa Monica again presents an authentic Irish afternoon tea from 3-5:30 p.m. Thursday (at $15 per person) and offers a number of traditional Irish dishes on its regular lunch and dinner menus for the day. And that old Hibernian hangout Lalo and Brothers in Encino serves dishes from the Bailey restaurant in Dublin and the Bally Maloe Cookery School in the same city, to the accompaniment of both classical and Irish songs sung by Margaret O’Carroll, winner of the Golden Voice of Ireland competition. . . .

UCLA Extension’s Division of Culinary Arts stages a free open house Saturday at UCLA’s Dodd Hall, Room 121, starting at 10 a.m. Instructors of food-oriented extension classes will discuss their plans for the coming term, answer questions and offer informal educational counseling.