At a certain point, there was a traffic jam. The achar cart at Adda had just rolled up on our right, the wide mouths of the jars filled with pickles of mango, caperberry, and pepper gaping like hungry seals. To the left, the table next to us was enjoying the opening chords of the restaurant’s coveted butter chicken service, selecting the wood chips that would smoke their chicken from a different cart. A server with a party tray of chaat, served like cigarettes at the Playboy Club, was waiting to get through to us. If anyone needed to use the restroom, they’d simply have to wait. We were too busy being attended to.
Adda draws on long traditions of tableside service: bananas Foster in New Orleans composed while you watch, the red light-green light dance of a Brazilian steakhouse, a classic dim sum service. But these days, especially at finer dining restaurants, tableside service — and carts — seem to be everywhere, serving everything.
In San Francisco the trend has boomed and almost busted, with Holbrook House, Bar Crenn and State Bird Provisions all offering tableside martinis and cocktails. Martini carts are also found at Borgo and the new Chateau Royale in New York, while elsewhere in the city Cuerno, La Tete D’or and the Dynamo Room serve various iterations of steak, and Briscola Trattoria rolls out dessert. But as Adda shows, it’s not just drinks and carving stations. Atlanta’s Atlas has both a cheese cart and a Madeira cart to pair, while LA’s Baltaire pipes icing onto cinnamon rolls, and Chicago’s Anelya wheels out a platter of Ukrainian snacks.
Tableside service is glamorous like room service at a four-star hotel. Like a foot-long cigarette holder, it’s old Hollywood lushness — why yes, dahhhling, bring it to me, I shan’t be moved. Most cart service offers some form of customization, whether it’s choosing the liquors and garnishes for your drink, or selecting bread to be theatrically sliced. And yes, food is always brought to you at a restaurant, but the spectacle of its creation next to your seat, the power to point to this, this, and that and have it whipped up just to your liking could make a woman go mad. Apparently we want that power. Maybe it’s all we have.
At the Alston in Chicago, chef Jenner Tomaska says he wanted to carry in the “refinement and personal touches and over-the-top moments that encompass a lot of tableside things” that the team executes at his other restaurant, Esme. That’s accomplished with a bread and butter cart, and a classic pressed duck service with a flambé of cognac. “You get the immediate sense of time and place we’re trying to accomplish,” he says of the Alston’s cart service. Plus, “it turns everyone’s attention. It’s like a fire sale. After you do one, you end up doing 20.”
For proprietors, the appeal is obvious — watching a duck get flambéed at the table makes for an intense “I’ll have what she’s having” moment. There’s no hard data on how many more oysters a restaurant serves when they’re presented in full next to your table, but when the server at Ilis rolls over the chilled seafood cart and tells you all this could be yours for just slightly more than the high price you’re already paying for your tasting menu, it seems ridiculous not to indulge. And it’s just so indulgent. Pointing to the gin you prefer behind the bar and specifying a twist is boring, but make that same order from a bar that’s come to you? Purr.
It’s a vision of luxury at basically no extra cost for the restaurant. And that curb appeal means chefs are more willing to work out the kinks of cart service, which is naturally more difficult than just bringing things out as ordered. As Tomaska notes, carts take up a lot of space in a busy dining room. And there’s also the question of food waste if the carts operate more free range.
When Love Shack in Portland first opened, owner Garrett Love says there was a 50/50 split between food and drink carts roaming around, dim sum-style. But he quickly realized, “if we brought out six of one dish, and we only sold four of them, we’ve wasted two because we can’t recycle them or re-serve them.” Now, he uses the carts mostly for tableside martini and mini drink service, with an occasional food special rolling around — currently, it’s build-your-own caprese salad.
It obviously helps that the carts just look cool, IRL and online. As a night out continues to cost a higher percentage of one’s monthly income, diners are looking for specific visual experiences, not just a good meal. Priya Krishna writes in The New York Times that “for many diners who grew up in the visuals-obsessed Instagram era, a restaurant doesn’t need to have a particular aesthetic — it just needs to have a memorable one.”
However, Dana Rodriguez, chef and owner of Carne in Denver, says that, while the restaurant’s martini cart does inspire online posts, that wasn’t the primary goal. Instead, it was getting people to post less.
“When people go dining, you can see a beautiful couple sitting at a table, and all they do is just look at their fucking phones,” she says. She tries to distract diners from their phones with ’70s glam decor, which includes carts that can be summoned with a little bell, festooned with vintage copies of Playboy and every martini garnish one could want. It’s hard to scroll when you’re too busy customizing your drink.
The interactivity of the carts, whether it’s choosing one’s Bloody Mary ingredients or watching as a duck goes up in flames, gets diners to actually engage with where they are. “People take a picture, which is great, but then they talk to the servers,” says Rodriguez. Or they talk to another table, or just among themselves about what they see coming down the aisles. Even if you never flag down a cart, you still get dinner and a show from neighboring tables.
“The main reason I think people are liking it so much is that accessibility and that interactivity,” says Love. “They’re getting to see and experience it, even if they don’t order.”
Which is, indeed, the entire point of going to a restaurant. You’re there to eat, yes, but also to experience something you can’t get at home, to be around other people, to be served rather than to fetch. To crudely summarize Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table, you go to a restaurant the first time for the food, but you return for the mood of the room, the way a sommelier lights up when recommending the perfect wine just for you, and for — say it with me — the hospitality.
A tableside cart is perhaps the ultimate expression of hospitality. You are out and in at once, for a moment the center of attention at a riotous party. It’s the personal amid the communal. Which is a reminder that to live any sort of life, you need both.
