Grice at the Restaurant

---- By JLS
---------- for the GC

---- THERE IS A PICTURESQUE (i.e. not mafioso) restaurant of Italian ancestry in Oakland where Grice would, as a sort of ritual, meet with 'friends'. These were strictly philosophical spaghetti. Grice liked Tuscany wine and kept a good few bottles of that wine in his cellary.

ITALIAN restaurants are bad on the service side. Have you ever dined in Rome? In Trastevere it's even worse? While Jason K. comments on the Guatemalan 500 years of training for the waiting-service, the same cannot be said of the haughty ROMANS in Rome. (On the other hand, Italian waiters -- I never had ANYTHING but Italian waiters there) in London, while thick on the accent front, tend to be more 'Florentine' in manners).

-----

The ritual of implicature in the restaurant is an interesting one. These are the "Restaurant Conversations", or "Conversation overheard at a restaurant". With the waiter of course.

In general, I don't know. I pity them. Most of the waiters I've had seem OBVIOUSLY NOT enjoying the job. I never met a waiter who looks as if he is enjoying it. Yesterday it was a local holiday, and the journalists were interviewing people, with a waiter saying "I wish it were a holiday for us -- gastronimic industry is the most belaboured one".

---- Is there a gender correlation? I distinguish between teen-age waiters (surely unprofessional) and 'teen age waiters' who obviously have connections with the business. This can be fun. A teenager seems to enjoy being a waiter. They can be rude -- especially if male -- and they don't care a fig. They don't do 'the specials'. Females, teen-aged and slightly older, tend to be less rude, but there are exceptions.

The main thing is the distance from your table to the kitchen. Plus, how many other tables they are waiting on. Whenever I'm about to order an entree and see my waiter carrying a creme bruleee to the next table (and thus taking from me all desire to go to my entree, but directly to the dessert instead) I wonder: 'Who was the stupid French who invented the restaurant?'. It seems obscene to have everyone gathered in a room with people eating different things at different times.

In the old days of the Lido at Venice (vide "Death in Venice" by Visconti), the restaurants worked, I like to speculate -- with hotels, and thus it was an organised ritual, where dinner was served, at, say 8, and everyone had the a-la-carte thing, with waiters tidily organising the thing in synchronicity. No desserts being seen in view while you are enjoying your mock-turtle soup ('a soup made out of a mock-turtle,' of course).

Restaurants are good to ask what you mother won't cook for you: rabbit, duck with orange, and even snails. Etc.

Now for the implicata:

Kramer first, then Kennedy, and then their combo:

(a) Kramer:

I've noticed that in restaurants with the most attentive service, the staff always asks only for permission, "May I bring you a drink?"

This one is a good one. In the places I've seen they add, the unwanted 'implicata', i.e. something that SHOULD Have rather been left unsaid,

"It's a courtesy of the house, you know".

----


"May I take your order?", "May I clear?", "May I show you the dessert menu?", "Is there anything I can do for you?"

This seems like the exception to the rule: the other queries all had the obvious form, "May I...?" (Note that "May I?" while uninformative at the level of what is said usually implicates allright and counts as a conversational move per se -- cfr. the answer to the servant in Helena Bonham-Carter's "The Heart of me": "If you may". (i.e. if you may LEAVE).

Kramer notes:

In the theatre of the restaurant, all inquiries into the customer's state of mind are unduly intrusive. The waiter needs only to know what he has permission to do. Anything else takes us into the customer's psyche, where strangers, and especially, servants, are not welcome. All questions imply entitlement, and the waiter has no entitlement beyond the information he needs to do his job for the customer's benefit. That information need never be inferred from other information, which, by hypothesis, is beyond the waiter's need to know. Thus, the waiter asks for permission, and he gets it or does not, with no further intrusion into the diner's mind. It's quite a formalized ritual.

In the restaurants you've been. I find that the locals find 'improvisation' (must be the influence of American jazz music) more to their taste. My friend, for example, enjoys INTRUDING into the WAITER's Psyche -- "What would you recommend?". I find that anti-Gricean. What bothers me is the waiter going, "No. Not that! I would rather order this". I find it is UNethical to say that a dish served by their restaurant is less than perfect.

--- There's the maitre d', too, which does the rituals of opening and closing. The idea being ... he is too high to be just a waiter. Odd ritual.

(b) Jason agrees with Kramer and adds:

Likewise, the customer does not want to experience the servant's character. I have observed here in Guatemala (where service is often very good, as one would expect after 500 years of training for the role), that the bad service, when it is encountered, happens against a background of the person being 'nice' or 'interesting' etc, supplementing their lack of skill with 'personality'. This led me to an outburst, after being presented with a coffee and then having to ask for sugar, wait for sugar, ask again for sugar, of "I don't want personality! I want total and utter anonymity, that is the mark of doing your job properly, being a functioning absence, a black hole of utter utility..." etc. It is a genuine art, and I appreciate it and am happy to recognise it, *after* the event. "Are you finished?"
"No. And I will permit you to divine when I *am* finished by smashing a few plates into the wall."

---- But then again, some people (my friend) would ask the waiter, "What do you recommend". Or spend some time studying the wine list, "But this vintage?" etc. The waiter in this instance (I mean, if I were one) would seem to need the right answers. I suppose, "I'll be d-med if I knew" does not count, even if abiding by Grice's qualitative-quantitative maxims ("deny you know if you don't -- be less informative but do not venture beyond the evidence you have for the topic to hand").

--- There's also dress code. The anonymity is enforced by they (the waiters) wearing a uniform. No waiter (female) can dress BETTER than your lady friend. I THINK in some places run by teenaged waiters, the dress code is NOT a necessity, which shows. There is some requirement too about hair cuts -- I have never been served by a female waiter with a beard --.

In general, waiters fall in two categories:

(i) If it is a French restaurant (serving French cuisine -- cfr. Grice on 'French poet', "French poem", "French citizen", this blog) (AND "French" cuisine is ALL that counts (all other cuisine is otiose), the waiter is pardoned if he has a ... French accent. This is usually a mock one (It is very easy to mock a French accent: just mispronounce the 'th' (in 'the') and add a nasal dipthong at the end of 'dish'). The point of having a French-speaking waiter in a French restaurant is not to endure the torture of having those sillily named dishes murdered in elocution.

(ii) Other. Hungarian waiters, for example, tend to show a trace of their Hungarian accent. This is more obviously evident in restaurants that cater for an 'international' clientele. As in New York, in the opera season, around the Metropolitan. The occasional Italian, or more likely these days, Russian soprano or baritone, may ask for a dish in their thick 'brogues' and the waiter is best to reply in tone. It's different in the vernacular dinner where you ask for buffalo wings. Similarly, we can distinguish between conversations where there is NO language barrier (i.e. both waiter and customer are from, say, New Jersey) and where there IS language barrier (when you, Jason, order in China as you tour with your Chinese publications).

---- The Language Barrier.

When there Is a language barrier, it is otiose to work out the implicatures. Jees (as Geary would say), they (the waiters) are already having their minds set in coding and decoding appropriately to (never) mind the 'beyond-the-truth-conditional' realm. Plus, it's unfair to disimplicate what they have unintentionally 'implicated' ("What do you mean there are no toilets?"). Etc.

Leech has variations along Gricean lines of the famous line:

A: There's a fly in my soup.
B: Shh! Or else they'll all want one.

---- ("Principles of Pragmatics", 67). In this worn out snappy answer to silly customer remark, Leech notes, the waiter is being "Griceian". "He has noted that the conversational move of the customer is of the 'indicative-mode' type. He then proceeds along the Polyanna principle, where people only express "good" feelings and good things. "Look! (with appropriate intonation and tone), "There's a dark fly tap-dancing in my soup.".

Oddly, in some (especially Asian) restaurants I've seen, the numerical device instituted elsewhere by Kramer seems to work. I have spent five minutes figuring out how to pronounce it, and pronounce it to the Asian waiter, with some pause, to have her outburst in the vernacular, "OK -- Number 31 then".