Peter Calder: Restaurant pet peeves

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A best-of-the-year list of restaurants doesn't really work. Restaurants go downhill (and uphill) and, in any case, an annual survey cannot hope to cover the field.

So, in lieu of a best-of list*, here's a list of pet peeves, by way of advice to the restaurant sector. I am, by nature and professional assignment, a fault-finder after all, and we could all do with a bracing antidote to the sickly sentimentalism of the Christmas spirit. Here goes:

1. Write it down: It is very cool to commit an entire table's orders to memory. But the chic factor slips a little when you have to return to check, and disappears entirely when the wrong stuff arrives. (Note: Suggesting the customer must have forgotten to order something is a perilous escape route, particularly if he is a restaurant reviewer).

2. Nor any drop to drink: Don't ask the water question. You know, the one that begins "Are we having sparkling ...?" Arrive at the table bearing a glass of water for each diner. We can manage from there. Honest.

3. Know the food: All the waiting staff should know everything about each dish. Ideally they should have tasted each one. It's a bad look to say "I don't know".

4. What does that mean? Cut the pretentious drivel from the menu. Everyone knows what coriander is, so stop calling it cilantro. And if you use highfalutin French terms, know what they mean. Saying that bucatini is pasta doesn't do it.

5. What's for dinner? They don't call it the information age for nothing. Put the menu online. This is as important as, say, switching the lights on. And update it. Having an autumn menu online in September makes you look stupid. Oddly, potential customers may want to know what they might get to eat.

6. As she is wrote: On the subject of menus: correct spelling never annoyed anyone. I will proofread your menu for free. All you have to do is give a damn.

7. Turn it down: The volume of the music attracts more correspondence than any other single subject and not all those who write are old farts. The music is not for the entertainment of the staff but to create a nice ambience for the diner.

8. Get a booking system: Or have the decency to be honest about it and put a sign outside saying, "We're so terrific we don't give a damn whether you come or not."

9. Buy a pepper grinder per table: Menacing diners with a grinder the size of a baseball bat before they've had a mouthful is just dumb. Sometimes I want to put pepper on a single tomato.

10. Do I know you? There is a perfect term of address pitched midway between "sir" and "madam" on one hand and "guys" and "darlings" on the other. It's nothing. We can tell from your eyes who you're talking to.

*Oh, all right then: 2015 will leave me with very happy memories of (in random order) The White Rabbit, Xacuti, Woodpecker Hill, Apero and Beirut.