The food is not the meal

Here‘s a common compliment: “You’re a great cook. You should open a restaurant.” I say that sometimes. Not that I really mean it, but it’s acceptable hyperbole.

On the other hand, here’s a saying that rings with genuine truth: “The food is not the meal.”

Ah, now that’s real wisdom. And it’s wisdom for Saipan, at least to the extent that we want to serve what remains of the tourism industry. If ever a saying applied to tourism, this is it.

Indeed, the food is not the meal. I imagine an Eastern sage dispensing that wisdom, perhaps from atop a mountain hermitage. But for all I know it came from a nightclub manager in Vegas, hunched over a Seven and Seven in a dark corner booth, waxing philosophic about his business woes as My Way plays in the background. Sages come in different guises, you know, but only some of them have to make payroll.

Of food and meals, well, that’s just an analogy, of course, for bigger things. But I like connecting the dots in the literal sense just to get things rolling. After all, I think we’ve all known some great cooks in the family kitchen who bet everything they had on the big dream of having a little restaurant. Unfortunately, the odds are very long, and, usually, the business lives are very short.

An all-too-typical scenario finds the aspiring restaurateur diligently tending to the duties in the kitchen, while relegating all other aspects of the enterprise to peripheral status. I can understand this. A good cook wants to make good food. That’s the focus, with the hope that everything else will just, you know, fall into place somehow.

Of course, “somehow” has never happened in the entire history of business.

Meanwhile, the customer, oblivious to the kitchen, has a chain of events to focus on. We’ve all been through this as customers: The waitress goes into exile so she can text her boyfriend, the tables and the floor are dirty, the menus are smudged with handprints and food particles, the restrooms aren’t clean, nobody wants to pull the plug on the loudmouth and his cell phone the next table over, and, once the ordeal is finally drawing to a close, it takes five minutes to cash out since the staff seems perplexed when somebody waves a credit card at them.

Been there. Done that. Forgot what the food was like; didn’t care at that point.

This dynamic applies to tourism in a big way; I don’t mean restaurants, I mean anything. It’s notoriously hard to view a tourism business through the eyes of our clients. For one thing, the situation is different; as workers, we’re used routine and familiar surroundings. But our customers are often confronting entirely alien surroundings, which makes their perceptions more acute.

One big bugaboo I’ve noticed is the waiting thing. Me, I don’t mind hanging out in your office, flirting with your receptionist, and drinking your coffee for 15 minutes because you are late. But I’m not a tourist on Saipan. I’ve seen many a befuddled group of tourists trying to fathom why they are completely shunted aside for indeterminate amounts of time because somebody dropped the ball on the scheduling side of things. Sometimes delays are inevitable, but usually they’re the result of sloppy management. And, on that note, it wasn’t until I enlisted help from Asian tour experts that I realized how deeply aggravated many tourists are at the waiting thing.

In fact, I’ve found that there is no substitute for having expert assistance from natives in the culture at issue. What isn’t a big deal, or a big problem, to you or me might be a real slap in the face to foreign customers. The conundrum here is that we often don’t know enough about what constitutes a potential problem to point out where the problems might be. This isn’t rocket science, but it requires an aptitude for problem solving that is bleeding from Saipan as the private sector flees the island.

Overall, tourism is the act of doing five times the amount of work you thought you’d have to do, then getting 1 percent of the praise you thought you deserve, all to get half the profits you expected to earn. And, the next day, you get to do it all over again.

Fortunately, what can really clear the air of all the seeming complexity is the simple fact that the food is, indeed, not the meal. If we can view that through the customers’ eyes then we’re on the right path.

Or, we can play My Way on the jukebox, then hunker down in a dark corner as we mutter to ourselves about how it all went wrong.