Different Service

In different regions you will receive different service. Depending on where you are in the country, or the world, the standard of service and even the quality of the food will be different. Different areas will tolerate different dining experiences. Pennsylvania, where I'm from, is known for some of the worst service anywhere. People also routinely tip about 10-15 percent here. The environment creates different expectations. 

I found myself unexpectedly in my hometown on mother's day, so we did what we do: Brunch. Pennsylvania is not exactly brimming with bars, or cute walkable neighborhoods. We settled on Temperance in Newtown. I'm wary of any bar or restaurant named after a virtue of abstaining in a non-ironic way. The service was embarrassingly slow, the server was almost inappropriately casual, the busboy's worked with more vigilance than any of the other staff, and I didn't see one manager in the entire establishment. Then there was the food. Everyone else in my family thought the food was delicious.

I'm going to tell you what the definition of delicious is in Pennsylvania: The star of the mother's day buffet is a fatty, flavorless, kind of gray looking prime rib. Pasta cooked about five minutes past al dente and another minute away from baby food texture. Oily vegetables and sweating pieces of cheese on an open-air platter susceptible to all manner of airborne pathogen. And for desert, crumbling cakes and pastries. If we served this type of food in Chicago we would have been out of business in a year or less. And If I gave that kind of service I would have been on the guillotine. However, I was the only one who seemed to notice how awkward and slow the service was and how terrible the food was. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying it so I didn't say anything, but I thought about it later. Maybe I've just been conditioned to expect more.

The same can be said about families and how they deal with tragedy. My family's inclination when anything goes wrong is to just have a party, get people together, drinking eating and talking. Somehow things just work themselves out there's food involved. So I'm surprised when I see a family that deals with tragedy in the more, I don't know, victorian way. Little togetherness and more personal mourning. In public everyone was mostly together, if only as a front.

It's as if death brings some families closer and pulls other families further apart. In the last 6 months I've been to two funerals for the same family. One for my friend's mother, and another for her step mother. The unfortunate irony of the situation is that the viewing was on mother's day. My mother, ever the opportunist, suggested I come home for the service and make a pitstop at brunch on the way over.

The timing was not intentional from what I gathered. It seemed as though everything just happened so suddenly that they just made the quickest simplest arrangement they could. It had also been simultaneously happening for a long time so in a way I'm sure the family was expecting what was coming. It was all so different than what I was expecting. It made me realize how different families are in how they deal. Maybe I just came in with an expectation of what the scene would look like and was surprised when it was very different. My friend could not have gotten out of town any sooner after the service either. She didn't want to stay one more day than absolutely necessary. I even offered to let her stay with my family if she wanted another day to relax, but she was determined to flee the scene.

Different people need different things to be content. The people that live here don't need fifteen dollar cocktails and charcuterie plates, they want a solo cup of warm champagne and some deli cuts. Maybe what one family needs to grieve isn't enough for another. People need to find what works for them. It's not really my place to comment on what different people need to get by, but I still find it interesting how different things are from state to state, city to city, and even from household to household.