Food on the Brain: Servers Must Learn a Menu's Tiniest Details

By Katya Cengel

Can I grab a pen really quickly,” asks Greco, a bartender at Lilly's A Kentucky Bistro on Bardstown Road.

“You might want to,” replied Brad Jennings, the restaurant's general manager.

That's because tonight's pre-shift meeting includes a written quiz, something Jennings throws at his serving staff about once a month. It is one way to ensure that the staff stays up to date on the local farmers and foods that Lilly's is known for serving.

Knowing the nightly specials is no longer enough at many local, upscale restaurants, where the patrons are likely to be well-versed in the best-selling books of writers like Michael Pollan and apt to question servers about the tiniest specifics of how their food went from farm to table.

At Lilly's, servers need to know where Stonecross Farms is located (question two on today's quiz). They need to know who the cheese maker at Sapori d'Italia is — yes, his name — and that Greg's Greens has moved to Indiana.

Chef and owner Kathy Cary was a pioneer in the “eat local” movement and people expect food from Kentuckiana farms when they dine there, explained Jennings. The menu mentions many of the farms the restaurant uses and servers are trained to offer further details when asked — which diners are almost always curious about.

It's “just one more thing to be responsible for,” said Greco, but also “one more thing to be proud of whenever anybody talks to you about it.”

Painting a picture

So Lee lets the pictures do the talking. Pictures taken at the farms where he gets some of his ingredients — an apple orchard, a peach tree, a corn field — and that have been printed on huge canvases and hung on the walls of the restaurant. That way, instead of telling customers where the food comes from, said Lee, we “offer a visual, sort of display of what it is we are doing here.”

Jeremy Johnson at the new Butchertown gastropub Blind Pig, has already run into this problem.

“It's tough,” said Johnson, the restaurant's general manager. “You'll find once you put it's from this one farm, then all of a sudden they have a problem. They can't get it to you any more.”

Still, so far he believes it is worth the effort. As for the serving staff, he says they approach serving food the same way they do wine: “Which is, the more I know about this, the more I can tell a customer about this, and the more involved I can be, the happier a customer's going to be.”

And that is how it should be, said bartender David Metcalf.

“Really, in any business, if you're selling something, you should know your product,” said Metcalf.

But that doesn't mean he always has the answer. Several weeks ago when there was an elk fillet special from New Zealand on the Blind Pig's menu, a customer asked why they were getting elk from so far away. Metcalf had to consult someone higher up the food chain at the restaurant and was told that there was no nearby elk available at the time.

Charles Van Stockum, a server at Proof on Main, likes answering questions.

“It makes my job a lot more entertaining, to be honest, because there's so much to talk about,” he said.

And learn.

One of the things Van Stockum enjoys about serving food in a restaurant that practices farm-to-table dining is that he is continually challenged to learn more. When the chef goes over the menu in pre-shift meetings, Van Stockum listens carefully and enjoys asking questions. Because the menu is fairly sparse, he said, “It's really the servers' job to take that brief description of the dish and … paint that picture for them.”

It is that creative expression that separates service from hospitality, said Van Stockum. Service means being on time, getting the guest what they ask for and trying to be correct, he said: “Hospitality is something different; it's an art.”

At the downtown farm to table eatery, 732 Social, Chef Jayson Lewellyn says they look for servers who are as passionate about sustainability as the rest of the staff.

“So the learning curve isn't very steep with us and our staff,” Lewellyn said.

Back at Lilly's, the learning curve following the quiz isn't too abrupt either.

“Did I get the phone number right at least?” Greco asks of question number 12 — what is Lilly's phone number.

He did — and quite a few others as well. As for the cheese maker, his name is Giovanni.

The answers, right or wrong, don't directly affect the servers' jobs, said Jennings, but it does let him know where he needs to focus in their education and lets them know what they need to know to take care of their customers.

Kaye Wheeler has been with Lilly's nine years, but even she has trouble keeping up with where all the farms are. When the Pike Valley chicken thighs first went on the menu, she said, she didn't know where Pike Valley was.

Her colleague Kelly Rucker keeps it all in his head by studying the menu, which undergoes major changes four to five times a year, over a good cup of coffee. But that isn't always preparation enough, especially at the end of a very long week, as happened recently when Rucker had a table looking over the wine list and asking if he could recommend a cab.

He recommended a cab service before realizing his mistake.

“They're like ‘Never heard of those before' and I was like ‘Oh, wait a minute, you want cabernet sauvignon. Those are taxi services.”