When customers attend fine restaurants, they expect great customer service as much as upscale décor, white tablecloths and delicious cuisine. But Westlake Village’s GetDining believes the service has gone downhill, and it has the numbers to back it up. The company conducted a four-year study on the hospitality practices of restaurants in markets including the San Fernando Valley, Westlake Village, Agoura Hills and Glendale. Eating establishments received an average score of 22.2 out of 100 percent, which the researchers think was caused by an ineffective working relationship between servers and managerial staff and a lack of hospitality training. “Restaurants are losing hundreds of thousands by not focusing on hospitality,” said Sean McGillivray, managing partner at GetDining. “We have concluded that guests have become inured, accepting that people are not going to be friendly.” Researchers visited 100 restaurants unbeknown to the owners and measured how servers operated in 27 categories, including “the welcome,” table approaches and coordination of service. The company rated each factor on a scale of 0 to 5 and combined the rating of each restaurant, resulting in an average of 1.11 on a scale of 5.0, or 22.2 when converted to a percent scale. Brooke Burton-Luttmann, an L.A. restaurant consultant and writer of the blog Food Woolf, is skeptical of the GetDining methodology, stating that it will perpetuate a negative image of servers in the restaurant industry. “There is such a high level of disrespect toward people in the service industry that it makes it hard to do the job,” Burton-Luttmann said. McGillivray said the study results confirmed that “the greater the contentment levels of (servers), the greater their ability to be hospitable.” – Champaign Williams