Co-owner Laura Ozyilmaz works in the kitchen at Dalida. The restaurant has about 10 no-shows a night, which wastes staff time and resources.
It’s 9 p.m. on a weekend night at Dalida, a bustling eastern Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco, and yet, while most of the diners are scraping their bowls to scavenge their last gooey spoonfuls of caramel rice pudding, the staff — line cooks, servers, and the rest — are still as tense as a coiled spring.
By 9:20 p.m. the restaurant is nearly empty, save for the staff.
But the ovens stay hot.
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Eventually, the owners, Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz, throw in the towel and swallow the hard truth: The big group that reserved a 9 p.m. table isn’t going to show. Everyone they’ve scheduled to serve the table has been lingering for nothing. When the couple finally gets a hold of the no-show party, there’s no excuse. Just, “We forgot.”
On average, Sayat told me, the restaurant has 10 no-shows a night. “It hurts me every single time. Like how could you disrespect the 60 people working in this restaurant like this?”
“It’s demoralizing for everybody,” said Laura, including the cooks who are waiting around, the servers whose tips are being impacted and the hosts who have to bear the brunt of explaining to ornery customers why they can’t seat them at the clearly empty tables.
Having customers cancel or even no-show a reservation is a normal, if loathed, reality in the hospitality industry. But San Francisco restaurant owners and staff tell me that the situation has become increasingly tense thanks to a newfound........