Prepping For Busy Lives
And creating hospitality in the home
Preparing the table each day for a family with busy lives, I found to be the most challenging daily task of all. For a single dad, running a corporate office of a restaurant group, attending school related activities, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, doing laundry, and shuttling three children to and from after-school activities, getting a home-cooked meal on the table each night might have seemed the least important part of my day. Yet, I made it the most important. As previously explained, there is simply something sacred that occurs among friends, families, and even strangers, when they have a meal together. I didn’t let a busy life take that special time away from my family.
To pull off providing a freshly cooked meal each evening to my busy family, I took a page, well several pages, out of serving meals in a busy restaurant. It was through this process of trying to figure out how to be fully prepared and present for my family at dinnertime, that I developed the method of delivering "hospitality in the home." And the concept of hospitality in the home is the basis for my new series titled, “Sacred Table.”
What does hospitality mean? The definition of hospitality is "the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers." The hospitality industry of restaurants, hotels and resorts are the only retail businesses that use the term "guest" to refer to their customers and truly mean it. That is no mere accident; to genuinely be hospitable, you must treat the people you serve as guests.
Think about other retail experiences you encounter. Do you feel like a guest when you go to the local hardware store? How about when you purchase items on-line at Amazon? How about at the DMV? You do, after all, pay for the experience of renewing your driver's license and car tabs. Finally, despite marketing lip service about "flying the friendly skies" does anyone truly feel hospitality on an airline flight?
The reality is, in most of our daily commodity exchanges, we feel lucky if we are treated as a customer. Most of the time we feel treated as an annoyance. That is why restaurants, hotels and resorts are so special. When we go on vacation, we endure the hassle of the TSA line at the airport, the polite, yet extremely unhelpful flight attendants, the long line or lost reservation at the car rental (see Jerry Seinfeld for a laugh,) or surly Uber driver just to get to our vacation destination. If you are like most vacation travelers, you do not truly feel like you are on vacation until you check into your hotel or resort. That is because it was the first time in a long day of expensive commodity exchanges that we felt like guests instead of customers.
Now, hospitality in the home is the same. Whether it is serving the same three familiar family faces each evening or your crazy aunt Petunia on a surprise pop-in visit, hospitality is the goal. And this goal starts with setting the table.
Here is how setting the table in my home developed. When I was a young father, I went through this same routine every evening.
Start dinner
Clear off all the junk that got deposited on the dining room table since yesterday
Pull the necessary plates, flatware, placemats, napkins, and glassware from the cabinets and set the table.
Serve dinner
Clear the table
Wash plates, flatware, and glassware
Put all cleaned dishes in the cabinets
Leave the dining room table bare until next meal service
This was the pattern I went through for each meal service. I was astonished at the amount of junk that could accumulate on a dining room table in less than 24 hours. The daily mail, children's homework, the beginning of a craft project and my own work briefcase all found temporary homes on the family dining room table. Clearing those distracting objects from the table prior to setting just added more time and annoyance to the meal preparation process. And we all know that when we are annoyed, we do not feel very hospitable. I am pretty sure this daily annoyance scenario is connecting with more mothers than fathers right now.
Here is where I took a page from the restaurant handbook. When you visit a restaurant, if it is decent and well run, the table is set prior to your seating. In fact, after the last guest left, that table was cleared, cleaned and reset. Tables in restaurants are always prepared to receive new guests, whether it be in five minutes, the next shift or the next day. Yet in our homes, we clear our dining room table and leave it inhospitably bare and unready to receive guests until the next home meal is served. Then we “Groundhog’s Day” our way through the same eight laborious steps above.
I thought to myself, why was I wasting so much time preparing the table for dinner each night? The clearing of the daily debris, setting place mats and napkins, pulling all the China, glassware and silverware from their kitchen storage locations and setting them before each chair. After dinner, clearing the entire table, washing all the wares and putting them away, only to pull them back from their storage location tomorrow to repeat the process. It was a time sucking and thankless endeavor. I resented the task and then I had a breakthrough. Why didn't I just do it like a restaurant?
I adopted the restaurant table setting mentality. After each meal served in my home, the table was cleared, a chore assigned to my children, cleaned and reset for the next meal. Not only did it look nice to always see the dining room table set, but a set table also created a welcoming effect on all who dined with our family. The beauty of purposely setting the dining room table for the next meal is that it created an invisible barrier to unwanted clutter. With a permanently set table, the daily mail, homework and all other horizontal real estate seeking objects of the household found other, nonobtrusive perches to rest upon.
Our family dining room table comfortably held six people and, like a restaurant, I set all six places even though most evenings it was only four of us sitting down for dinner. The setting of extra places at the table made the table look complete but it held more important significance. Having extra place settings on the table was inviting to the unplanned guest. And, as my children advanced to junior and then senior high, extra guests abound. Because our home was known as the place where the family dinner was “chef” prepared, the table always set, the conversations always lively, those extra two seats were often filled by my children's friends. But, when that extra guest appeared, having the table set was a welcoming feeling instead of the uncomfortableness that occurs when an extra seat must be added to the table. Think about the time you dined at a restaurant and five people were seated at a table set for four. The odd person out always feels burdensome and unwelcomed as the staff scrambles to accommodate their addition to the table.
When you learn to think of hospitality like a restaurant operator, there is simply no additional effort required to prepare six meals instead of four. Those extra friends, after all, did not just show up for dinner unannounced, I knew of their presence in the house and always asked them if they would be staying for dinner. I know that with some of my children's friends, sitting at a fully set dining room table and being served a home-cooked three-course dinner was the first such in-home meal service they had encountered. I took delight in providing them with that special experience.
How did I always have food for the unplanned guests? In my next post, I will explain how running restaurants inspired me in my procuring, prepping and serving of the daily meal. You may find prior posts of this series I titled, “Sacred Table” below. Thank you, subscribers, for your support in my work.
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