when you are served by human, it just brings certain je ne sais quoi.
i’m baffled both by the angle of attack and choice of an image (is this retweet of musk?)
when you are served by human, it just brings certain je ne sais quoi.
i’m baffled both by the angle of attack and choice of an image (is this retweet of musk?)
The “sit-down service” of proper restaurants is 80% generating the feeling of being waited on like a noble. Without that subservient dynamic, you’d have maybe a quarter of the wait staff, maybe less.
The restaurant, the waiter, and the menu, as we know them, are fundamentally institutions of capitalism. If preparing and serving food was oriented toward everyone’s harmonious well-being, the setup and the socially necessary labor would be completely different.
I came to this realization from working in restaurants for a few years after becoming a socialist. At every turn I was thinking “wow, this is so inefficient and bourgeois”.
I don’t think I disagree with any of that, or that any of that disagrees with anything I’ve said. I guess the only thing I’d add is that it is nice to be looked after, outside of sheer sadistic pleasure in dominating someone else. It’s nice to just relax and let someone else facilitate things, and it’s nice to provide this service to other people outside of a wage-slave context, as anyone who’s hosted dinners for family etc knows
All the best weeks of my life were on trips where market and money relations were either an afterthought, or had been outright bypassed- before age 20 these were church or scouting events, and after age 23 these were anarchist communes.
We would cook 2 to 4 things in bulk per meal, done either on a rotation or by whoever was the most motivated to, everybody would serve themselves, and it was super cheap. Dishes were also done based on motivation. On the anarchist communes we would even pull off all kinds of gourmet specialties.
Cooking labor was much more efficient than piecewise-to-order restaurant model, cleaning labor was optimized, and waitstaff simply did not exist. Everybody already looked after each other. Maybe if someone was disabled we would bring a plate to them. Maybe 1 person would serve as “host” role per 100 people dining.
I have worked all up and down the chain of production as a server, a cook, a wholesale purchaser/inventory manager, a vegetable farmer, and a grocery retail employee. Of all of these, being a server is the only one I would not choose to do again if it were purely out of my own volition.
I feel like there are some things where efficiency isn’t paramount though, right? You wouldn’t go into an art gallery and lambast them for not fitting more paintings on the walls. Nothing against the ‘one massive pot’ model tbc — I myself have enjoyed those set ups immensely. But I still think there is a place for something restaurant-like outside of capitalism. Maybe a much smaller place, sure. But service is an art, and some people get really into it at the top end of the market