Impressions
Your job as the server to humanize yourself
People feel entitled from the get go: “I am paying for this so I should get what I paid for” yet there is no account for any trouble, delays, problems that might happen. “It is mine as soon as I pay for it, so I should have access right away”
The more you converse (primarily this!), make eye contact, offer yourself for their needs before they ask for things, the more they realize that there is not just the order itself, but another human like themselves right there handling the order. The less you talk, the less you look at the clients, the more you focus on the numbers and orders instead of the wellbeing of clients, the more that entitlement shows as the whole staff becomes more like robots handling the orders rather than actual humans
It’s not like they want to be entitled or act worse towards others, it’s just the brain doing it’s thing and optimizing “unnecessary” info out. In this case: leaving aside trying to conjure up stories to emphasize with people you’ve never met. Part of it is of course trust mirroring: if you show compassion and trust towards someone, they will become inclined to answer with the same, it’s a dialogue, a dance, “you care about me, I care about you”
It’s all about shared identity (How to Control a Crowd), story and connection. Some may find the food mediocre or bad (even if it is good, something may have burned or any other thing that could happen in kitchen), yet will completely change their tune once they know more about why the cafe exists, what it represents, what it is the staff is trying to provide. Food is more like a fraction of the experience. If they know why you are messing up (because it’s your first time running a cafe or such), they can empathize and take part of the experience more holistically and the food, service and atmosphere gets reframed.
As staff, if you create shared identity, story, or connection then the experience will be better. But it takes time. It is completely at odds with trying to serve as many costumers as possible. Difficult balancing act, as spending too much time at tables creating connections might lead the people in line to have a worse experience. The less people you take in, the stronger the connections, yet the less you can take or the more staff you need.
It becomes a finesse of expectations: how you present the space (can they stay for a long time or do they have to walk with the orders), how much do you let people from the outside see (do they see a long queue, a lot of people waiting at tables, are the staff talking to others, do the other customers look irritated and bored, engaged and satisfied), how your space and words direct the customers to act in certain ways (do they wait in line or sit down to wait).
Best compliment: “how many years have you guys been doing this?”
Statistics
250-300 people, most took a single item to share between 2-6 people
50 quesadillas, 33 butterchikens, 33 puree soups w bacon, 20 coconut ball cups, 10 tapas plates
There was an interesting pulse of sorts to the way crowds rolled in. 30-45 minutes of really high intensity back-to-back-to-back orders, then 10-20 minutes of relaxed sparse orders and repeatedly until the end
Open from 11:00 to about 16:00, core of the menu was sold out at around 15:00-15:20
Only leftovers were wines (red was more popular than white) and tortilla plates and some tapas cheese/serrano.
Around 400 euros of materials and setup resulted in 850 euros of income