The soul behind the counter
A lot of restaurants have started handing you an iPad and calling it progress. We never will. Here's why.
The first time it happened to me — at a sandwich place, ironically, not too far from here — I stood at the counter and waited for somebody to take my order. A minute passed. Two. Eventually a young employee leaned out from the back, pointed at the iPad on a stand, and said, "You order on that."
The iPad was greasy. The buttons were tiny. It tried to upsell me four times. Halfway through, it timed out and dumped me back to the start screen. I made it through eventually, paid a 25% gratuity to a kiosk that had done literally none of the work a human server would do, and went to wait for a sandwich that was, when it arrived, mediocre.
I kept thinking about it on the drive home. Not the sandwich. The transaction. Somebody — probably a consultant who'd never made a sandwich — had decided that the moment of being greeted, asked what you wanted, and looked in the eye was the inefficient part of lunch. The part to remove.
The thing the screen quietly removes
I think a lot about what the screen is doing in that scenario. On paper, it's "taking the order." But that's not really all it's doing. Compared to a person, it's also:
- Not noticing when you look confused.
- Not telling you the chipotle chicken just came out warm.
- Not warning you that the salami's a little spicy this week.
- Not remembering you came in last Tuesday and got the Vegan.
- Not chatting about how the kid is doing.
- Not catching it when you accidentally double-ordered.
- Not throwing in an extra cookie because the line was slow.
Every one of those things is small. None of them shows up as a line item on a P&L. Together, they're the entire reason a deli is a deli and not a vending machine.
The kiosk does the visible work. The human does the work you don't notice until it's gone.
What we hire for
We don't hire people who can use a screen. (Most people can use a screen.) We hire people who like other people. Who notice things. Who can read a room — or, more honestly, can read a customer who looks tired and just needs lunch fast versus a customer who's clearly here on a date and wants to take their time picking.
The people behind our counter know which sandwich runs out first on Saturdays. They know which of our regulars takes their pastrami without onions. They can tell you what the cookies are doing today. They'll fix it if something isn't right, and they'll do it without making you feel bad about asking.
You can't program any of that into a tablet. You can program a tablet to ask you for a tip. That's about it.
It is a little less efficient. We know.
We get it — the math of human service is harder than the math of kiosk service. People cost more than tablets. People take breaks. People take orders at human speed instead of finger-tap speed.
So why do we do it anyway? Because the alternative is to take the human warmth out of lunch and call that an upgrade. That's not the place we wanted to build. We wanted to build a deli — the kind your dad would have stopped at, where the guy behind the counter calls you "boss" and tells you the meatballs are good today. We wanted you to leave a little better than you came in.
A screen can't do that. We can. So we do.
If you have to ask for the password to a sandwich place's bathroom, it's already too late
There's a moment in the modern food industry where a place stops being a restaurant and starts being a logistics system that happens to produce food. You can usually feel it the second you walk in. The lighting is colder. The team behind the counter looks past you. The menu has been engineered for tap-throughput. There's a screen between you and your lunch.
We are working hard, every single day, to not be that. We bake the bread fresh. We learn your name. We greet you when you come in. We say goodbye when you leave. We pack you up a couple of extra napkins if you ordered the Sourdough Dip because, friend, you're going to need them.
That's not a feature. That's just how a neighborhood deli is supposed to work. It's what you get on Pollard Road. It always will be.