Restaurant Politeness Training 2

Vocabulary in context

The best restaurant staff make it look as though they're not following a script — but they are, in a sense. The phrases that work, they've used hundreds of times before. They've used them so naturally, in so many situations, that the script has become instinct. This exercise is how that happens. It presents real restaurant scenarios and asks you to choose the response that a genuinely skilled front-of-house professional would give — not the most polite response in the abstract, but the most useful, warm, and effective one given the specific situation. Repeat it enough, and it stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like who you are at work.