6 Rules For Dining Out That Waitstaff Really Wish You'd Follow

Now that we’re all back to dining out like we did in the good old days (pre-COVID), the rules of what’s acceptable and what isn’t have changed. For instance, fine dining once required specific place settings and dress codes, but that hardly exists anymore.

“Fine dining, as we used to know, is almost entirely dead,” author and teacher Matt Batt told HuffPost. “I think so many of the old rules of etiquette are kind of gone, and I think it’s for the better really.”

For several years Batt worked in restaurants, including a mob-run diner in Milwaukee, an Asian-German fusion restaurant in Columbus, and the James Beard-nominated Brewer’s Table — located above Surly Brewing — in Minneapolis, which shuttered in 2017. “It was in almost every way the best job I’ve ever had,” he said.

Last year he published the book ” The Last Supper Club: A Waiter’s Requiem” about his experience waiting tables and working almost every position imaginable at restaurants.

Michelle Wildgen is a novelist and writes about her experiences in the food industry through the books ” Wine People” and ” Bread and Butter .” Based in Madison, Wisconsin, she waited tables in high school and college, and for a few years worked at the James Beard award-winning restaurant L’Etoile.

“Post pandemic, I do feel like the standard of service has kind of gone down,” she told HuffPost. “I think people are stretched thin. They’re looking for more staff. They don’t have as much to work with as they used to, in terms of who the restaurant can hire and how great those people are going to be and how happy they are to be there. I do feel like it’s a lot more common for there to be a kind of dismissive attitude or for you to wait for a while, and it’s not as great as it used