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Food

Your Eggs Will Be Less Rubbery If the Chef Can See You

A study shows that when the people making your meal can see you, they'll put a little more TLC into your breakfast and everyone ends up happier. So you might want to grab those counter seats.
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US
Photo via Flickr user Daniel Bogan

There's a fun element of transparency in watching your dinner being assembled in an open kitchen, between the sizzling (check out that kitchen fire!), the banter between cooks ("86 SHORT RIBS!"), and the plating (now that's what I call a bed of purée!).

You may feel like it adds an air of excitement to your overall dining experience, or even builds a little delicious anticipation as you wait for your dishes to come out. But it turns out that this isn't all just in your head, and isn't just about you being able to watch your duck confit being prepped. A recent study has found that when your cook can see you, you're more likely to enjoy a better quality of food.

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The study was conducted over the course of two weeks by Ryan W. Buell, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, along with Tami Kim, an HBS doctoral student, and Chia-Jung Tsay, an assistant professor at University College London. The three researchers tried four different configurations in a pre-existing cafeteria: one in which diners and cooks were obscured from each other; a second wherein diners could see the cooks, but not vice versa; a third in which the cooks could see the diners, but not vice versa; and a fourth, where cooks and diners alike could watch each other in action.

The diners and cooks were not actually face-to-face; they were visually connected (or not) by a setup using iPads and videoconferencing. Sound was not transmitted, and there was no physical interaction (high fives and French kissing were presumably prohibited). After their meals, the diners were asked to rate their quality of service and food.

Buell told the Harvard Business Review that when the cooks could see the diners, the diners reported 10 percent more customer satisfaction—even when they couldn't see their meals being prepared by the cooks. Surprisingly, when only the diners could see the cooks, they couldn't really care less; the ratings were no higher in that scenario than when neither group could watch each other. When the opposite was true and the customers and cooks could both see each other, the perceived quality of the food increased by more than 17 percent, and service was more than 13 percent faster. Mutual rights of visibility might be the ticket.

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The team concluded that cooks and restaurant employees feel measurably more appreciated and more engaged when they can watch customers happily gobbling up all of their hard work. Duell told the HBR, "It's important to note that it wasn't just the perception of quality that improved—the food objectively got better."

One example he cites is that when out of sight, chefs would typically make eggs on the grill in advance, leading them to be overcooked and rubbery by the time they made it to plates and mouths. But when chefs could see the recipients of said eggs, they became more likely to cook them to order.

On whether or not the chefs could have been putting more effort into their cooking because of performance anxiety, Kim told the HBR, "We found that reciprocity plays a much bigger role than stress or accountability … Cooks constantly said how much they loved seeing their customers." The chefs even commented to researchers that they wanted to keep the iPad setup and that they enjoyed the sensation of their work being witnessed and acknowledged by a (literally) hungry audience.

Buell also noted a interesting element of the experiment involving sandwiches. Customers who ordered a sandwich and then stuck around to watch it being made at the prep station actually rated their service more favorably than those who ordered and then waited in a line out of sight of the sandwich-making process. Suddenly questioning whether or not you hate waiting in line? Us too.

So if you want less-rubbery eggs or a more mouthwatering sandwich, you should probably grab those counter seats.