While you’re not looking, the silverware and plates loitering in your dining room whisper subliminal messages to your customers. As Feng Shui would have it, everything in your restaurant—the breadbaskets and steak-knives, the place mats and ramekins, the things atop your guests’ tables and the decor surrounding it all—radiates chi, good or bad, that curbs your guests’ attitudes. Whether or not you believe in the spiritual energy of a salt shaker is irrelevant. The vibrancy of a napkin, say, or the curvature of a carafe sets an atmosphere. As with the music and artwork, you must gather tableware that coincides with your restaurant’s personality. For some owners, paper plates and styrofoam cups suffice. From the Tao Te Ching: “We are each unique and therefore valuable / Though the sage wears coarse clothes, his heart is jade.” These owners have chosen homeliness as their motif and that is perfectly all right.
Don’t be mistaken, though, there is a very big difference between being modest and being ordinary.
A particular company, located in the heart of the Occident, understands the subtle power that common objects can possess. This company’s wares exude an undeniable Feng Shui essence. Less baseball cap than toque blanche, American Metalcraft designs its tableware with flowing, deliberate, and idiosyncratic sculptures. While their unique dishes might seem conspicuous among the red and white checkered tablecloths that deck traditional mom and pop diners, it is nonetheless a causal fit for hotels, upscale restaurants, weddings, and other catered events. It’s clear that a loving personal energy went into creating this plate and this punch bowl and this juice dispenser. This personality embedded in American Metalcraft pieces provide a certain element that’s lacking in most commercial dinnerware today. The element of surprise..Imagine that, while pacing the floor of your restaurant, you overhear a customer—a woman—say to her husband, “I cannot get over how cute this plate is.” Her delight, of course, is fleeting. In an hour she will have forgotten all about your strange, cute plate. She has no idea of the painstaking effort that crafted your restaurant’s aesthetic or the hours it took to train your servers in how to behave. But, for a short second, you were able to surprise and impress a customer. For your business and for yourself, this is the most important thing. You were able to supply someone, momentarily, with good chi.
