Opinion: outpouring of love for Montreal restaurants turns to disrespect

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On a recent Saturday, as I was staring at an empty table No. 6, a table for four whose occupants had confirmed just three hours earlier, “we’ll be there, no doubt!” – I understood that the love was gone and why many popular independent restaurants are closing or in their last stages.

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The blockade brought out the “love of restaurants.” Social media was overflowing with enough heartbreaking comments about small and intimate remains lost to fill a heartbreaking Russian novel. The first weeks of the “big comeback” brought that love, and it was felt. But now, the odes are more like haikus.

Before I get on with my spiel, let me assure you that 90 percent of customers are great.

Then there are the 10 percent, the spoilers who arrive 45 minutes late and order a tomato salad off the menu (when the trees have already lost their fall flower). Worse still are the ones that don’t even show up.

While no-show for a corporate restaurant is a cold statistic, for an independent restaurant it’s personal, an expression of contempt for the house and its employees (empty tables generally don’t tip well). When we approach absent guests, we meet like a ghost like a teenage prom date, the corsage in a trash can.

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All departments of a corporate restaurant are headed by an independent restaurateur. We are looking for new employees while we douse the flames of burned personnel. We order and receive merchandise, contact the bank about a possible NSF check, run to the SAQ only to find there is no tequila (yes, it happened; zero, nothing, nothing). We try to bring new ideas to the table (literally), while maintaining quality control. All for an empty table No. 6 and a broken promise.

The tables are real estate for a restaurant; They need to be filled twice a night to keep the business healthy while keeping menu prices low. Turning the table is oxygen for the industry. So please don’t be critical when we ask you “early or late” when taking your reservation, or insist on 7pm, which is not sustainable for us.

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And if you agree to leave before the second service, don’t delay. The basic laws of physics prevent us from sitting two people in the same place. The delay creates a traffic jam that would make even a road infested with construction cones in Montreal blush.

Some may say, “Gus, if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen!” Maybe one day I will, but I ask you, who will descend into that hell after we leave?

The current personnel crisis for the service industry is a future bite crisis. Many of us fell in love with restaurants as dishwashers and bussers, getting our adrenaline pumping and seeing miracle foods for the first time.

Enrollment is low at cooking schools. Additionally, savvy young chefs are opening hybrid quick-service, understaffed, and equipped restaurants for UberEats, rather than full-service restaurants. This provides fewer opportunities for future chefs to be trained to operate and own a full-service restaurant.

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“Gus, I hear you, but is what happened to the client always correct?”

Yes, but that does not mean that the restaurant is always bad. Both the customer and the owner love restaurants, so we must work together to respect and support them so they can survive.

The pandemic taught both owners and customers that full-service restaurants are not essential. Life goes on. Many chefs got off the hamster wheel.

We know that you love our restaurants and we appreciate it. But when something is loved without being respected, it is like a toy. Restaurants are not toys for owners, chefs and waiters, they are our workplace and our livelihood. So treat them more than a toy, or we will lose them one day.

David Ferguson is the owner and chef of Restaurant Gus, in La Petite-Patrie.