The importance of seemingly outdated service points in the modern restaurant.

Much like the ridiculously verbose title of this entry, some of my colleagues in the service industry find traditional “open hand” service to be cumbersome and unnecessary. “Open hand” refers to the tradition of not showing the back of your hands to guests ever, and requires the server to maneuver around quite a bit in order to achieve this. For some guests, this seems a little confusing as they wonder why the serve just doesn’t leave the darn plates on the table rather than bounce around back and forth serving from either side of the table.