NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That joke is from the Borat movie. Pretty funny, eh?
Ok. Since Ynet is making some dubious claims about Israeli restaurant habits, I’m going to set the record straight.
Claim: “A majority of Israelis eat out at least once a month, and most of them leave a generous tip to their waiter, a survey conducted by the REST website among 1,476 respondents revealed.”
Fact: Wait a minute here, a popular restaurant menu website conducted a survey about the extent to which people eat out in restaurants, and treated the result as a representative sample of Israeli society? Come on!!!
Claim: “A third of the respondents said that they go out to eat once or twice a month, while 29 percent stated they eat out at least once a week, and six percent replied they could not afford eating in restaurants at all.”
Fact: I grab a falafel on the way to work twice a week. Does that put me in the top decile of Israeli restaurant patrons?
Claim: “Most of the diners are apparently very generous towards their waiters. Some 40 percent leave a 10 percent tip, while about a third give a 12 percent tip and 15 percent choose to give 15 percent or more. Only 0.2 percent do not leave a tip, and 1.7 percent tip only if the waiter has been extremely nice.”
Fact: Wow, this is pathetic. This is worse than pathetic, this is awful. 10% is not generous. It is highly inconsiderate to tip less than 15% without a reason (viz, poor service). 15% is the standard and we should all be tipping more for excellent service. I have found time and time again that Israelis are terrible tippers and they simply don’t know that it’s appropriate to use 15% as a standard. In Israel, many of the waiters earn very little money as their base salary, and many restauranteurs do not step in to make sure that their employees earn above the minimum wage, which comes out to roughly $4.25/hour. I can’t count the times that I’ve been in restaurants with Israeli friends and peers, or ordered food to be delivered, and my colleagues have been prepared to leave a tip of around 10% or less. It must be made clear to these people that the tip is an undeclared and informal – but very necessary – aspect of the price of prepared food and service in a restaurant and that they must take this into consideration when deciding where, and whether, to eat out.
Claim: “However, it seems that the costumers’ generosity is not always in line with the level of service they receive. Some 40 percent claim that the service in Israeli restaurants is mediocre, and only 8 percent believe that the service is ‘wonderful and courteous.’”
Fact: I don’t know about “wonderful and courteous,” but I have found that the service in Israeli restaurants ranges from good to bad, very much like in American restaurants. Although the service in Israel is in general far worse than in America, I’ve found that in restaurants it is unfair to say that the Israeli service is worse. Certainly restaurant service here is not at a 10% tip level.
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Well said.
I printed this out and gave it to our P2K shaliach in Richmond, with whom I’ve had multiple arguments regarding the quality of service in Israel (he thinks it’s great), as well as whether or not Israelis are good tippers (he thinks they are).
I will say that I agree that the quality of service in Israel runs the gamut, as it does in America, but I can’t think of when in America I’ve experienced service as bad as I did at the worst establishments in Israel, nor can I think of when in Israel I received service as good as the finest establishments in America.
I like to insult the service in Israeli restaurants (it’s fun!), but looking back, there were plenty of quality establishments in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and many other places. In Beit Shemesh, there were no restaurants, so it’s a toss-up.
Yeah, you’re pretty much right that Israel’s best in service is not as good as America’s best, and that Israel’s worst is worse than America’s worst. About the former, though, this is probably because most Israelis don’t have the kind of money it takes to eat out at a really fancy restaurant. Most Americans can’t do it regularly, but most Israelis can’t do it at all.
Anyway, as Israel gets richer and more and more Israelis get rich, I imagine that more and more nice and fancy restaurants will begin to open in Israel and that there will be more opportunities for excellent service.
Well, I also found there to be a stigma is Israel along the lines of “Why should we pay to eat out, when we can have a perfectly good meal at home?” And to the credit of Israeli mothers, it makes sense, as the home-cooked meals I ate were often better than what I would have been served in a restaurant. The same can’t be said for the, in my opinion, overall poor quality of home-cooked meals in America (especially in the Ashkenazi Jewish mother circle).
B”H Hmm…I’ve thought about this a lot. I don’t have any hard and fast data to agree or disagree with you. I’ll just speak from experience. I get the best service from the hidden away family-owned restaurants where NO English-speakers can be gound. When I’ve gotten bad service like when something was horribly wrong with the food, and the waiter throws me attitude about it. When I get in the waiter’s face in hebrew, the waiter sees that I’m not an American freir (sucker) and apologizes, and gives me extra stuff and a free drink, and we part friends. More than once, I’ve gotten into a fight with a serivce worker, experience resolution, then return and am treated lide a valued customer. Although I can’t say 100% for certain, there is definitely a cultural thing going on here. This I have seen to be true even for native-born Israelis who get into a fight with each other. A few minutes after the fight, they’re having coffee together.
I also find that the more I go to a restaurant, or a store, or a bank, I am recognized, and treated with more and more of a smile (Americans are accused of smiling too much.), and personability. The key is not to take any initialy unemotional reaction personally. Just match it. Eventually, you will find that you are promoted from “adoni” (sir) to “haver” (friend) or even “ahi” (my brother). It make take weeks or years, but that’s just the way it works here.
I hope the tourist industry here doesn’t operate that way, otherwise its in big trouble.
The worst service has come from places [to where I have not got willingly], where the restaurant caters to loud American tourists (not all American tourists are loud). There’s no excuse, of course, but I wonder if there is a correlation.
Overall I find Israel to be a more intimate place than the US. I wonder if the relationship between service worker and customer is just reflective of this cultural difference.
Just my “esser agaroth….”