now has anyone else noticed that in american restauants each waitress has certain tables and has to deal with them and there food. Well in a restaurant i have worked at you had waitresses doing different things for example one person taking orders another doing drinks and another dealing with bringing food to tables and this was so much easier because if there was any confusion with any part of the service they new exactly which one of us to go to!! seems so much easier that way! what u all think?

SORRY i know its not about gordon ramsey but it was his show that made me think of this!!

pixie, being here in the states, i think the system works fine, in a decent restaurant you rarely have any wait.. most wait staff will only work 2-3 tables tops in a good place. And if there is a mistake, its REAL easy to know where it came from

Hiya Ice, nice to know that you are still around. The system in England varies from restaurant to restaurant. In my salad days, the days when I was still at school and had a saturday job, I worked in a restaurant in a department store, (parent company Harrods), It was silver service, you know the type, with little white aprons etc and cute uniforms. I worked alongside the full time girls, (women from 30 up to 60), each had a work station containing all the cruets etc and each had set tables and you were responsible for all your own supplies, I worked 4 tables but on busy days and bank holidays this could be raised to 6. Each waitress was responsible for the whole service to each table so like you say there was no doubt as to who was responsible. My son now works as a chef in a busy chain of restaurants, (No not McDonalds!)the biggest complaint is from waiting staff, some who are doing nothing and other waiting staff being run off their feet as they have set tables, if it were me running the restaurant and still allowing the public to choose where to sit then I would be asking those not doing anything to help by doing the clearing down etc to work as a team. There are pro's and con's to each system, it all depends on how good the waiting staff really are and how well the kitchen fill the orders, you need the waiting staff to realise that just because the prawn cocktail on the pass is what you want, if it is the prawn cocktail for a table that ordered before yours then you cannot simply take it, it causes chaos and is not fair. There is good and bad restaurants wherever you go and good and bad staff, I don't really think that America in that respect is any different to here, only perhaps the attitudes culturally. Anyway Ice, hope all is well with you in Detroit. Weather here is pretty freaky at the moment, unseasonally warm followed by frosts and very high winds, we even had an earthquake of 5.4 on the Richter this week covering a large area of the country. Keep in touch. LDK