Servers commonly deliver an extended "Spiel" at the start of meals, reciting menu highlights, clarifying ingredients, and promoting select dishes. These monologues frequently feel halting and awkward, interrupting table conversation and slowing the evening. Delivery and content vary widely, producing little consensus on purpose or technique. Many diners encounter the Spiel across neighborhoods and price points. The practice has resurged alongside post‑COVID price increases, the conversion of small dining rooms into luxury spaces, and a renewed emphasis on hands‑on front‑of‑house service. Restaurant training often institutionalizes the Spiel despite mixed diner reactions.
The Spiel, for anyone fortunate enough to have somehow avoided it, is the increasingly long monologue that every waiter in town must now deliver to tables at restaurants of a certain price point at the start of each meal to talk through ... menu highlights? Things that might not be clear? Dishes that the kitchen would really like to push?
All Spiels do have a few elements in common: They are always halting, never not awkward. A Spiel breaks up the flow of conversation at the table and grinds the night to a stop. I am reluctant to single out any one restaurant because every place in town trains its staff to do this. I can't remember the last time I didn't get Spieled. But I do know its recent resurgence coincides with the post-COVID rising of prices, the transformation of even small dining rooms
Collection
[
|
...
]