Sometimes it’s the little stuff that gets to you.
Wilma Tonkin, a formerly happy Bob Evans customer, has been transformed into an unhappy customer. Why? Because she believes that every time she drives to a restaurant, sits down and orders a meal, she ought to get a spoon.
The people who run Bob Evans think she should get a spoon only if she orders something that is traditionally eaten with a spoon — say, yogurt or applesauce, rather than, say, beef jerky.
Tonkin and her longtime companion, Rich Prentice, of Hudson, frequent the Bob Evans in Streetsboro. The last time they visited, she found herself stirring her coffee with a fork.
She doesn’t like to stir her coffee with a fork. In her eyes, coffee is meant to be stirred with a spoon. When no spoon was forthcoming until after she asked for one, she asked why she had to ask for one.
She says the waitress told her the restaurant has a policy against blanketing the tables with spoons because spoons have a disproportionate disappearance rate: “The customers are either stealing our spoons or our kitchen help is throwing them away by mistake when they clean the trays.”
Um ... why would a kitchen worker be more likely to throw away a spoon than a fork?
“Well, I don’t know,” Tonkin replies. “But I told the server, ‘If you’re having a problem, I don’t think you should be accusing your customers of theft. And if you’re having a problem in the kitchen, that shouldn’t be your customers’ fault.’ ”
Now fully warmed to the topic, Tonkin asked the waitress for a phone number for the corporate offices to determine whether this was a company-wide policy or an ugly aberration on the northwest edge of Portage County.
While not addressing the reasons behind the policy, Tonkin says, the corporate office allowed that the spoon is “the least-used utensil” and confirmed that Bob Evans instructs its servers not to deliver one unless the customer orders a spoon-friendly item.
“I said, ‘This is totally wrong!’ ”
Tonkin told the customer-service woman that if she ever returned to Bob Evans, she would bring her own spoon.
“She said, ‘Oh, that’s not necessary. The servers will make the decision.’ I said, ‘Not for me they won’t!’ ”
Tonkin believes that if a paying customer wants to eat something with a spoon that traditionally is not eaten with a spoon, he or she should have the right to do so.
Well, I’m not sure what my mother would have said about that, given her reverence for Amy Vanderbilt. And I must admit that, if asked to rank my favorite utensils, the spoon would finish a distant third.
Morever, Bob Evans isn’t the only restaurant that initially delivers only a knife and fork.
Still, Tonkin might have a point. At a sit-down restaurant, shouldn’t the standard setting include the basic array of silverware?
No, says Margaret M. Standing, Bob Evans’ Columbus-based director of corporate communications. She confirms that Tonkin’s information is essentially correct.
“We changed our policy recently to only include knives and forks in our rolled silver, for a couple reasons,” she said via email.
“Spoons are our most re-ordered utensil, primarily due to accidental disposal after we clear a table. But the change is also because of the nature of our different business day parts; they don’t always get used. For example, many of our guests in the morning only use a spoon and most dinner guests only use a fork and knife.
“Providing only the utensils the guests needs is more efficient [one less item on your table] and environmentally friendly, too. I’m not aware that theft was part of the reasoning.”
In other words, Ms. Tonkin, you might indeed want to BYOS.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com.