There are other service/attention to detail conventions, such as the “cueing” conventions I’ve noticed in restaurants. When the bar waitress/waiter stops by, they often leave a coaster or bar napkin on the table. This signifies that you’ve been greeted and offered the opportunity to order a drink.

Decaffeinated coffee is often served in a cup with a paper doily between it and saucer. While the doily shows more staining than the saucer, it signifies “decaf” to the roaming refillers of coffee.

While these may seem more mundane than the napkin switch, they reflect a willingness to leave a silent signal on your table, rather than create an interruption to ask “regular or decaf?” or “would you like to order a drink?”

I’m sure there are more such conventions, but I haven’t actually worked in the restaurant business.

In the spirit of this site’s ‘laws of simplicity’ theme, I got inspired to think (way too much) about napkins in terms of law #1, ‘reduce’.

Napkins and ecology:
If you trust the restaurant to be clean (a look inside the bathroom is helpful there) then a dark-colored napkin makes sense because it doesn’t require bleach, as well as the reasons from the chain above: Given the average color of dinner bottoms and the whole lint issue.

Maybe fabric napkins are good: if cotton then natural fibers, and reuse it so manufacturing waste is amortized over entire life of the napkin.
With a napkin that is white, you can tell the napkin is clean - nobody is reusing the napkins without washing.

Maybe fabric napkins are bad: How much energy is required per napkin use, to run a clothes washer and dryer, as well as to create the laundry detergent? What about effects of soapwater runoff into our water supply? Maybe environmentally it costs less energy and waste to use a recycled-paper napkin. Keeping white napkins white uses a lot of bleach - not good for the environment.

Maybe the ideal ecological napkin is a small piece of fabric: less laundry per washing load, less energy washing and drying per napkin (since can wash huge number of small napkins in one load)?

Now, the black napkin… As a customer I’d be immediately stricken by the fact that they would rather change the color of my napkin (making me feel self conscious and awkward) than go the extra mile to make sure it would shed no lint! Make if of egyptian cotton of extra fine linen. Subtler and nicer.
Keep up your great work!

I’m not sure if that means fewer restaurants in the UK now bother about the effect that napkin lint has on diners’ trousers but I have to say that I haven’t come across this in my years of dining, not to mention my formative years working in my parents’ restaurant, where the napkins were orange (it was the 1970s though).

I have just started blogging on the topic of superior service - and already have a couple of restaurant tales - so I’ll link to the post as it’s a great example of an attention to detail that makes the customers’ experience that extra bit special.

Most of it was for show, anyway. If you consider how many times you’ve ever worn white (or any light-colored) pants to a restaurant, it would seem to make sense that all napkins would be black. The exchange from the white napkin to the dark napkin- the “show” is what’s valuable.

But there are hundreds of little things like that - both ostentatious and subtle that I remember doing. Warming tea & coffee cups. Icing plates. Ironing the newspaper. Heck, corking and tabling a bottle of wine is practically a religious ritual!

Sigh… I don’t miss those days.