Let’s face it, South Beach is known for a number of things, but great food service isn’t one of them (anyone who has recently dined at Sushi Samba on Lincoln Road already knows what I’m talking about). Long wait times, spotty service, and lack of menu knowledge are just a few of the service problems South Beach diners deal with regularly.
Any way you dish it out, the level of service in most of Miami’s fine-dining establishments doesn’t even come close to like restaurants in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. We at Haute Living Magazine wanted to find out what the deal was, so, we asked waiters and waitresses in our community to break it down for us. After extensive conversation and careful consideration of their answers, we are proud to provide our readers with the top five reasons South Beach wait staffs fall short on service.
- Waiters and waitresses in Miami have confessed that they don’t really care about your individual dining experience. And with gratuity being added to just about every check on South Beach, why would they?
- Many popular restaurants are like factories. They shuffle in as many people as possible in order to turn greater profits. A lot of the servers we talked to said their only real concern was getting you in and out of the restaurant as quickly as possible so they can rack-up the take home dollars. More tables equals more money. It’s that simple.
- Severs admitted that the language barrier in South Beach is often difficult to get around. Many customers don’t speak English, and many servers aren’t bi-lingual, so when it comes to taking care of non-English speaking customers, servers simply drop the ball.
- Any decent waiter can spit back what is written on the specials board, but when it comes to developing an in-depth knowledge of the food menu and wine list, South Beach servers admittedly fall short. Many member’s of various wait staff’s across the Beach chalk this one up to lack of training or lack of caring. Either way, we have a problem.
- South Beach servers said the reason they don’t care about providing good service is because guests don’t care enough to demand it. Kind of a Catch 22 if you ask us, but hey, maybe we Miamians need to demand good service from here on out. And if we don’t receive it, maybe we should refuse to tip. What you think?
While most restaurants on South Beach offer less-then-desirable service, there are a few establishments that know how to do it right. For example, the waitstaff’s at Joe’s Stone Crab, Prime 112, Morton’s The Steakhouse, Meat Market, and Macaluso’s, are fantastic. We highly recommend all of our haute readers dine at one of those establishments if quality service means half as much to you as it does to us.
