Restaurants

It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, “What makes duck more delicious than onions?” And also this: “In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won’t be here anymore.”

Franey’s cooking is elegant, muscular and ephemeral. He refers to “microseasons,” like the part of the onion season when the onion is most delicate. As a result, his cuisine is ever-changing; it’s a cuisine of creativity and spontaneity; it’s a cuisine of what’s new. It’s about a sensibility and a philosophy more than it is a collection of established “signature” dishes. Of course, Franey’s not alone in this — it’s the prevailing ethos of most ambitious young American chefs. Which is why it seems a little strange that the wildly talented Franey’s first executive chef job is at Canlis — 60 years and counting of marriage proposals, anniversaries, and meeting the in-laws. It’s a vibrant restaurant, not a museum, but it’s still known for the signature dishes it started out with, dishes that include a twice-baked potato.

Here’s a snapshot of what American fine dining was like back in 1964. On the cover of “Famous Foods From Famous Places: Specialty-of-the-House Recipes From America’s Leading Restaurants,” there is a bowtied waiter wearing a bright red sportcoat, drowning bananas in orange glop. The big, wilty magnolia blossom on the table is passing out from the heat of the chafing dish, looking like a sea monster dying to crawl back to the water. Bon appétit!

Inside, there is a section on Canlis, then 14 years old. Restaurant years being similar to dogs’, Canlis was already an elder statesman, and the book describes its speciality-of-the-house dishes: broiled steaks, steak tartar, prawns sautéed with vermouth, and, daringly, a Canlis Salad that, “with no apologies to Caesar, contains mixed greens tossed with croutons, minced bacon and grated cheese,” prepared by “pretty Japanese girls wearing bright colored kimonos.”

The meaning, the very point of a signature dish is that it doesn’t change. Rarely do chefs themselves set out to create one; it’s a designation conferred by the public, and yet, once you accept it, it becomes a pact with your diners: If you come here, you can have this thing. It’s both an honor and a bind. So how do you deal with that if your entire culinary philosophy is based on change?

Through most of its history, Canlis was considered a steakhouse. And while the ’90s redesign of the stunning mid-century modern building left a gorgeous, sleek, muted space, there is no missing its history: A massive, copper-plated grill station juts into the dining room like the prow of a mighty ship, where the Chef-cum-Captain, be-toqued and grand, would stand at the helm, meat sizzling before him.

“Back in the day,” Franey said, pointing to the grill, “the chef would call into the kitchen on a microphone for his plates. They might have all had the same vegetable, the same potato, the same garnish. He’d just put the steak on and send it out from the grill.” Fifteen years ago, Canlis made the shift to being a modern restaurant under chef Greg Atkinson, focused on seasonal Northwest cuisine, but the first thing Franey did was change the structure of the kitchen. Literally. He personally sawed down all the racks in the middle of the line so he could have his own station in there, cooking with his crew.

And this is what I mean by cooking: curing venison in pine ash. Slicing opakapaka into sashimi, serving it with fennel pollen. Spherifying a Tequila Sunrise. And also searing steak teriyaki, sautéeing prawns in vermouth, and plating massive Canlis Salads that dwarf almost anything else coming out of the kitchen.

The classics are delicious, to be sure, but isn’t their unyielding presence frustrating for a chef so inspired by newness?

“I’m not driven by my ego,” Franey said. “I work for this family, and those legacies are part of this family. Mr. Canlis said to me, ‘My name is on the door, but this place is bigger than me. It’s bigger than all of us.’ I’m here to cook for the guests. If you’ve been coming here for 30 years, and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t mess up my steak teriyaki!’ I need to earn your trust.”

It was a lovely answer, but, frankly just a little too diplomatic. Pressed, he eventually admitted that it would probably be easier to start a menu from scratch. But then he smiled and added, “But what’s the fun in that?” Learning to make really killer Peter Canlis Prawns was, too, a form of change.

We got back to talking about the duck. Even just remembering it made me a little wobbly. “What did you … do to that thing?” I could only manage to ask.

In his modest way, he said, “Well, we roast it at 450 degrees for 16 minutes.” Then he added, “We rub it in honey first.” I asked about brines or injected marinades or sorcery — what gives it that crazy, amazing flavor? “Oh,” he said casually, “and we dry age it for 14 to 24 days first.”

The aging, for which he works exclusively with specialty butcher Tracy Smaciarz, gives the duck a wild flavor, flavor you can’t make in a lab or a kitchen, flavor that is the handiwork alone of enzymes and bacteria and time. Coming out of the oven, it’s a powerful scent: the unparalleled aroma of browned bird skin, the sweetness of toasted honey, the floral perfume of the herbs stuffed into its cavity. But the thing, the thing that you can’t miss, is the funk. The funk the bird casts off like a lure, a smell like the edge of a prosciutto. If you get close enough to be impolite, it’s a bit like the part of the cheese counter where only eagles dare to fly. Woven into the taste of the meat, the funk is subtle, a backdrop of complex, floating, lingering flavors you can’t really place. It tastes deeper than duck you’ve had before, darker, weirder, and yet also somehow lighter. Less bloody and mineral, sweeter, a cheese-rind-tang rising through the fatty succulence. It tastes like genius.

“How did you think of that?” I asked.

“Well, I learned it from Daniel Humm,” he said, matter-of-factly, referring to the chef he worked for at Eleven Madison Park in New York. “And he learned it from his mentor, Gerard Rabaey.” And he probably learned it from his, and so on. It turns out that the tradition of hanging game birds to age is, well, very, very old. Medieval. Franey smiled. “Daniel said to me once, ‘We don’t really make anything new. We just do it well.’”

After I left the restaurant, I tweeted about my incredible meal at Canlis. The tweets came flooding back: “Did you have the duck?” “The duck!” and “Please say you had the duck!” I laughed. Looks like Franey has a signature dish on his hands.

So I called Steve Dublanica, author of the blog and book “Waiter Rant” and the forthcoming “Keep the Change: A Clueless Tipper’s Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity,” to talk about the relationships — and strategies — of tippers and tip-getters.

OK, well, first of all, do pleasant, efficient waiters get better tips?

When I was a waiter, I cultivated a friendly arrogance. That was my M.O. [laughs]. A good waiter adapts to every personality. There are people who like the archly reserved waiter, ones who like someone who will kid them a bit and give them a slightly hard time. Others who like the joke waiter, the entertainer.

But the thing that’s always amazed me is that the quality of service has almost no effect on tipping. When I first started out, I thought, “If I’m nice and efficient, people will tip me well!” Not true!

When I was researching for my book, I read a reader survey by Zagat where 80 percent of people said, “I tip based on the quality of service,” but self-reported behavior isn’t always true. No one’s going to say, “My girlfriend left me, I’m in a bad mood, and I’m a cheap tipper.” But a study by Professor Michael Lynn at Cornell found that the customer’s perception of service affects the tip only 2 percent of the time. He said, “Service affects tipping as much as whether the sun is shining outside or not.”

If you’ve waited tables, you know this is true. I learned this on the job years ago. You can give people amazing service and they’ll stiff you. You can give them horrible service, and they can give you a great tip. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. If only 2 percent of the tip is based on the service, what are the other 98 percent doing? If they’re not tipping on service, they’re tipping on psychological processes that are happening.

So what do people base their tipping on?

One is the social norm of tipping. For most people, they don’t want to stiff a waiter even if the service is bad because they don’t want to seem cheap, or they don’t want to feel guilty, or they don’t want to upset the waiter. Other people wanna be down with the working man. Or they want to reduce the server’s envy, like, “Here I am having a good time and you’re working.” We don’t exactly know where the word “tip” comes from, but the first recorded instance of the word meant “drink money,” so there’s a “Have a good time on me” element to it.

I knew a waiter who was a drug addict. He didn’t bathe a lot. He would come up to the table and people would say, “This guy smells!” They still tipped him. Waiters can be pleasant, they can be unpleasant, and that will have almost no effect on your tip. People will often still leave you that 15 to 20 percent.

But if your tips don’t reflect the quality of the job you do, why does any waiter bother?

First, if you’re a professional, you’ll try to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. That’s a matter of pride.

If customers get badly treated at a place, they will still tip — maybe even tip well — but they won’t come back. So there are external controls. Some waiters say, “I don’t need to be nice. I don’t need to put on a show.” But management might watch you, they might put on the pressure for you to perform. Your service will influence people’s return patronage.

Where waiters can make better money is if they cultivate a stable of regulars, people who they know are good tippers. You remember their favorite wine, their anniversary, their favorite table. You make them feel special so they’ll feel loyal to him or her. Smart waiters know that even if there’s no rhyme or reason to how people tip, they know there are people who tip well, so they try to get them to come back and to improve the odds in their favor. If you’re supposed to be kind of diffident, kind of rude, then you’ll do it. If you’re supposed to be a joke teller, then you’ll do it.

And being a good tipper will improve your service, because we will remember you. One customer would tip me $200 to $300 at the holidays, and she never had a problem at my restaurant. She could call me on a busy Friday, and I would move heaven and earth to get her a table. You don’t care why they’re good tippers, but you want them in your section.

Something that’s interesting to me in this conversation is that we keep using the tip as a sort of proxy for how satisfied the customer is with their experience. But since studies show that’s not actually an accurate indicator, how do you then gauge how happy a customer is with you? How do you develop customers’ loyalty?

You have to feel out every table from the beginning, and figure out what they want. Some people like a little repartee, a little battle of wits. Some really like to have their chains pulled. Some are trying to win the waiter’s approval.

In those cases you play it like a girl playing “hard to get.” Because they want to say, “This waiter was difficult and I turned them around, because I’m so good at dealing with people.” That’s what the customer wants from that experience. They’re looking for the waiter’s approval, not for their service. There’s a psychological need that the customer is trying to fulfill. In my first book, I write, “You have to find a customer’s personality and mine it for all it’s worth.” If you can tell the customer wants you to be their friend, you have to play hard to get, and come around in the end so they’ll leave happy.

Why do some people like to be abused, or like an aloof waiter? Some people like that. And some people like being whipped, dragged on a chain and told they’re a bad boy. You’d need far more psychological experience than me to figure that out. When I go out to eat, I want my waiter to take my order, bring my food and be nice.

Robert et Louise is the kind of straight-up restaurant you feel you can trust. A pot of good, strong mustard on the table counts as sauce. A jar of chunky salt, too, if you’re fancy. It’s not no-frills as much it’s like, “Frills? What are frills?” Despite the fact that you’ll hear English spoken at every other table, it’s a place that suggests authority and authenticity (whatever that means to you). The meat, grilled in an open fireplace, is served on wood cutting boards, cratered with the millions of cuts made on it before yours. The room is all smoke-stained rafters and wood — dark and beautiful and permanently slightly sticky from the decades of vaporized meat juices floating through the air. A savvy, nostalgia-peddling restaurateur could have a field day with this décor, but, instead, the room is lit too brightly and the fireplace is fueled with what looks like wood boards the cooks happened to pick up on the way to work. The owner sits at the end of her bar, content to say hello to tourists in warm but businesslike manner; just another day serving grilled meat. It feels like there is a good chance that this restaurant is older than your country, especially if you sit in the dining room in the cellar, which may in fact be older than humanity. The solidity of all this inspires trust.

And trust is important when you go to a place and order a steak saignant, which is how they recommend it, and which is a really beautiful-sounding word that means “bloody.” I’m not talking about “rare.” I’m talking about black-and-blue, just barely seared on the outside and essentially raw inside; the meat is actually still cool in the center, and if you’ve never had steak this way, it’s an … experience.

I eat raw fish without even thinking about it. I eat raw meat, in the form of tartar, without too much pause, mainly because it’s all chopped up and mixed in with other tasty stuff. But there is something about cutting into a big steak and having it look like it could still be in a butcher’s case that is a little bit disconcerting. It’s vampire-red. The fat cools off quickly to an unpleasant waxiness that you’ll want to cut around. And it’s actually not very juicy, but on the plus side, that’s because the heat hasn’t had a chance to tighten up the muscle fibers and make them expel their juices.

Maybe that’s why the flavor of Robert et Louise’s bloody cote de boeuf (extra-thick ribeye) was phenomenal, totally different than any beef I’ve ever had. It was very lean, having hardly any marbling, the whisper-thin ribbons of tender, melting fat streaking through the muscle that I’ve always looked for as a sign of quality. And so it didn’t have the rich unctuousness that I used to think was the hallmark of great steak. But this meat was incredibly lovely anyway, full of clean, complex mineral flavors and a literal sweetness. Flavors so different they struck me, and I was compelled to savor each bite slowly, teasing them out. (And, because the thing didn’t start out very hot to begin with, there wasn’t much of a hurry to eat it all before it got cold.)

It’s an accepted wisdom that marbling is what makes for tender meat, and yet, while lean, this steak had a silky texture. Saying meat “melts in your mouth” is a cliché that was literally forbidden from being printed in Gourmet magazine, but for once in its miserable life, that phrase actually fit. Cutting it into small bites, it didn’t feel like I was chewing on it so much as making it dissolve into a rush of flavor so intriguing it captivated me from start to finish.

I have to admit that I didn’t ask about the breed of cattle the steak came from, or where it was raised, or play any of the favorite ask-the-cook games of the fancy food lover. I kind of wish I had, so that I would know whether I’d have to get special French beef to ever have such magnificent meat again, or if I could get most of the way there by cooking my next steak bloody rare. But as we left, I walked over toward the grill and saw the cook cutting steaks from a massive haunch, dotting it with salt the size of peppercorns as it sat at the butchering table waiting for the fire. And I was content to leave with that in my mind, that scene playing itself over and over again for the rest of forever.

Robert et Louise
64 rue Veille du Temple – 75003 Paris
+33 1 42 78 55 89
Open Thursday-Sunday for lunch and Tuesday-Sunday for dinner
Get the Cote de boeuf for two (40 Euros); its extra-thick cut gives you much more rare meat than the thinner entrecote steak. The fresh sausage appetizer is also fantastic.

“Menus,” he said, “are supposed to be the classic example of free choice, but menu designers have found that there’re many ways of getting you to order what the restaurant wants you to order” — the most profitable dishes, presumably.

The techniques he laid out are fascinating: a box drawn around certain items, for instance, always draws the eyes — and attention — there. This might mean these dishes best highlight the kitchen’s skills, or, more likely, they make the restaurant the most money: The ingredient cost is low, or maybe they take the least staff time to prepare.

But, more subtly, the box might not simply be encouraging you to order whatever’s in it. “There are places where there’s a $150 hamburger,” Poundstone said. “The first thing everyone does is shake their head. But then you go down the menu, suddenly the $50 steak doesn’t seem so outrageous.” Our sense of value is always relative, and a technique like this, which gets you over your sticker shock early, can skew that sense just enough for you to find yourself saying, “I’ll have the steak medium rare, please.”

Similarly, when a menu offers a choice between portion sizes, the more expensive large will make the small seem like a better deal. Poundstone suggests that the smaller size is often the more profitable one, but I’m not sure. You have to account for staff time — it takes just as long to cook a half-plate of pasta as it does a full one, for instance — and, of course, exactly how much more food the cooks are putting in the large order. But still, the savviest restaurateurs know that having a larger, more expensive version of a dish makes the small one seem like a good deal, and they’ll make sure, small or large, it’s a high-profit item to begin with.

As he spoke, I recalled the lessons I learned on menu layout in culinary school, most of which revolved around the Prime Objective: make people forget about money. Round to the nearest dollar and skip the cents, avoiding more numerals that can draw attention to the cost. Don’t align the prices at the right side of the page, causing people to run their eyes down the column and compare numbers without even reading the menu items. (And lines that lead the eyes from the item to the price are a mortal sin in the eyes of Mammon.) Knowing that the eyes hit the upper right side of a menu first upon opening it, savvy designers will put the items they want to push in that area, so they catch your attention first. They’ll bury the ones they don’t want to feature — the ones that don’t make money, or the ones that just sell themselves without any help — below those. If it’s a two-page menu, you will go back and read the entire left page, take another look at the top right, and by the time you get to the middle and bottom of the right page, your attention is probably fading. So that’s where they bury the items that they don’t mark up that much or dishes like the steak, because the guy that’s going to order the steak is probably going to order the steak regardless of where it is. And all this strategy is before we even get to menu wording, which is another art in itself.

At the end of the interview, Kasper gave a chuckle and said, “Ah, nothing like being a victim at the restaurant.” It was a gentle joke (can anything said in her hot cocoa voice sound harsher than a mild chiding?), but we, the Masters of our Destiny, always bristle at the idea of being manipulated, and I wondered about the fairness of her insinuation.

The first rejoinder of course is that restaurants are not dinner parties; they’re businesses trying to make money. But looking over my vast collection of menus, ones slipped under my door by delivery boys, I see none of these design techniques, but plenty of extra decimal places and right-justified numbers. And I realized that it’s a certain type of restaurant that has resources to expend on menu psychology.

The fact is that these sorts of restaurants are selling you more than a full belly. They are selling you an experience, an entertainment, a fantasy of your life as expressed in a meal. And what meal tastes better when you’re busy calculating how much each bite is costing you? Of course, people have their budgets to follow, and ones with tight budgets are likely going to be extra vigilant of how much they’re spending regardless of subtle design tricks. But once they’ve committed their money, shouldn’t they also get the most out it by enjoying the night without worry?

There is an important distinction between saying that these menus are hiding their prices and saying that they are helping you to focus on the food when making your choices. The former is cynical. The latter gets you excited for what’s going to come, looking forward to the evening unfolding before you. There’s something every smart restaurateur knows: Make your business feel like a dinner party, and people will come back. And pay again.