On a recent Thursday my husband and I showed up at a cute bistro right when it opened. “You’re in luck!” the host said when we told her we didn’t have a reservation, then led us past a slew of perfectly good empty tables to the lonely back corner by the swinging kitchen door. With every passing employee came an unwanted puff of detergent, the harsh clangor of dishes, and snippets of metal clashing with the gentle folk issuing from the dining room speakers. Was this “luck” or was I in purgatory for the reservationless?
It’s impossible to design a restaurant that only comprises faultless tables or that could satisfy the fickle wants and needs of every diner: amid the bustle or tucked away in a quiet booth, by the windows or overlooking the open kitchen. But do restaurants actually save their least desirable tables for walk-in customers, or are our feelings getting the better of us?
“I’d say it’s extremely common that restaurants save a subpar table for walk-ins,” says Nathan Thurston, a Charleston restaurateur and longtime restaurant consultant. Typically, the dining room floor plan won’t actually label certain tables as undesirable or bad, he adds; rather, those tables don’t even appear on the reservation inventory. So out of 20 tables, 18 will populate the reservation map, and the spots by the drafty exit or the dish pit, in the isolated back corner or practically inside the restroom, are left for walk-ins.
From there, it’s a matter of reframing customer perception. “A smart maître d’ or lead host might tell walk-in diners, ‘I don’t have any reservations, but I do have this table you can sit at right now,’” says Thurston, who owns breakfast-focused Millers All Day in Charleston. Hopefully, diners feel so grateful to nab any table on a packed Saturday in our hyper-competitive reservation culture that they won’t even care that the bathroom is close enough for the aroma of scented candles to mingle with that of their curried prawns.
What constitutes a bad table, anyway? The owners of Adega, a Portuguese fine dining restaurant in San José, designed the space to not have tables close to the kitchen or the bathrooms—two areas that tend to draw complaints. Nevertheless, in the 10 years this Michelin-starred restaurant has been open, “there’s always one or two tables people don’t desire as much,” says Carlos Carreira, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Fernanda Carreira.
One problem table at Adega occupies a no man’s land close to where the dining room ends and the bar and waiting area begin; another sits in a pathway to the kitchen. Depending on how busy the restaurant is, Adega will keep one or both off the reservation map to accommodate the odd walk-in, though staff always get the OK from diners before seating them there. “That’s our policy. If they sit at a table that is not the ‘best,’ at least they were shown it and they’re aware,” Carreira says.
