Beware First Impressions

March 28, 2000

I went down for dinner in the hotel restaurant -- the Abbey Grill -- around 8 PM tonight, here in the Radnor Hotel, in the Philadelphia suburb of St. David's. I stay in this hotel every time I come to visit one of my long-term consulting clients, but the last time I ate in the Abbey Grill, a year or two ago, the service was so lousy and the food was so mediocre that I swore I would never come back.  I usually get here late in the evening, long after dinner, so it doesn't really matter; but this time I arrived early enough so that dinner was a necessity, and the room-service menu was so pitiful, without even a wine list, that I decided I would take a second chance with the restaurant...

The hotel seems to be almost full tonight, with a bustling lobby and a full parking lot when I checked in -- but the Abbey Grill was completely empty at 8 PM, except for a pair of fussy old women on the other side of the room, who were finishing up and complaining about their bill as I came in.  Thus, I was alone for the first ten minutes, and I ordered a bottle of Australian Chardonnay and an appetizer from an earnest, handsome, good-natured young waiter named "Jamey" (whose name I eventually discovered when I got the bill at the end of the evening). And then a couple came in, and was ceremoniously seated three tables away from me, by a bored maitre' de, along a long wall of banquettes and mirrors and ornate decorations, in a room that was far too gloomy with dark wood paneling and lithographs of drab landscapes and boar hunts.

I hardly paid any attention to them when they first came in, but they seemed to be a local couple that had decided to have an evening out; for all I know, this may be the only restaurant within 50 miles that serves anything more elegant than wienershnitzel and beer.  Anyway, she was a good-natured, pretty young blonde, with a huge smile for the maitre' de and the waiter, and who reminded me a lot of my own daughter.  And he was a serious, dark-haired man who appeared to be a few years older, and whom you would describe as "good-looking" but not "handsome"; he looked just a little bit awkward, like someone wondering if he had ended up in a a restaurant too expensive for the contents of his wallet.  Indeed, the most significant thing that I noticed was that he was wearing what appeared to be a dark, conservative, leather jacket --  not a motorcycle jacket, but a leather jacket nonetheless.  That alone was enough to create the basics of the first impression: a middle-class couple out for what they considered a fancy evening on the town, in what I considered a mediocre restaurant in a less-than-luxury hotel in the suburbs of a city that even W.C. Fields wanted to avoid.

Second impression: the couple sits down, orders a drink, gets settled, and starts chatting.  They're far enough away from me, and talking softly enough, that I can't hear very much -- but I do overhear her giggling and asking him to guess her age.  He mutters something softly, and she giggles again.  "One more guess, and then I'm going to have to tell you," she giggles, looking up at him coquettishly from a mop of golden hair that had fallen over her face. He mutters again, she giggles again.  Hmmm... I'm thinking.... not what I expected. "Tell you what," she says.  "I'll tell you what decade I was born in.  The 70s.  Now guess again...."

Well, by now, my second impression is totally different from the first.  I'm watching him more closely, and I see that he looks vaguely Middle Eastern.  Very conservative, very quiet, very formal and polite, very soft-spoken, very dark.  Not quite crew-cut, but relatively short-cut black hair and dark features, with heavy eyebrows and a hawk nose. Turkish, Syrian, Israeli, Egyptian, who knows ... and meanwhile, the bleached-blond young girl has taken off her jacket and is sitting against the banquette in a black, sleeveless dress.  Not too low-cut, no cleavage, no flashy jewelry, but still ... this is the suburbs of godawful nowhere, and it's totally different than what everyone else around seems to be wearing.

Thus, second impression: he's an engineer from some nearby company, and she's a call girl. She probably works as a receptionist in some nondescript company, and spends her evening making some extra cash with visiting engineers from God-knows-where.  It turns out, after a few more guessing attempts on the part of the earnest young man (who, by now, I'm guessing to be in his early 30s), that the young lady is 24 -- but she's quick to tell him that going to be 25 any day now! -- sometime in early May.  And she had good vibes about tonight's date, she says to him, she always likes to look on the positive side of new experiences, she just thought this would be a good thing to do. Yadda yadda yadda...  And at that point, my appetizer of broiled scallops wrapped in bacon arrives, so I began to focus on the food for a few minutes while their banter continues.  Good scallops, decent wine; my impression of the restaurant is improving.  Young Jamey is very attentive, refilling my glass of water the moment I empty it, and asking me three times if I would like any more rolls or butter.  No, no, I keep telling him, I'll wait for the main course of grilled salmon.  Any minute now, he reassures me, sorry it's taking so long...

Third impression: the young woman's name turns out to be Jessica, and after a great deal of inane chattering, she tells her date (whose name I never did hear) that she has only been living in the Philadelphia area since Sept 1998, having moved there from Pittsburgh. Her mother has moved from  Pittsburgh to Alabama, to a town 20 miles away from Birmingham, in order to get a better job(!), but her father is still in Pittsburgh; one of her grandmothers (in her eighties) has fallen and broken her hip, and the other one has had several strokes, and is absolutely nuts.  Yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah, god it's a good thing that I have a nice glass of Chardonnay to wash all this down with.  But then, all of a sudden, comes this little tidbit:  "After college," she says, "all I wanted to do was get into pediatric nutrition, especially in an area where I could do clinical work.  At first they stuck me in a totally different area, telling me I'd be doing research, but it was just clerical work. And while the patients were interesting, they were almost all outpatient people, so I didn't even get to follow up on them.  And so I said to Dr. Shlermy..."

Whoa!  Our young bimbo turns out not to be a call girl after all, not even a lower-middle-class waitress out for the evening with her biker-dude boyfriend.  And the young man turns out not to be a Middle Eastern assassin or drug dealer, but a medical intern recently arrived in Philadelphia area from Chicago, where he had done his residency work.  Both are working in a nearby children's hospital, and the the next ten minutes were spent with her trying to figure out how on earth he could have figured out her first name and last name, not to mention her office telephone number, given that he was working in an entirely different department. "I asked the receptionist in your department," he replies, deadpan, "for the name of the beautiful young blond woman with the blue eyes..."

For a moment, I had the impulse to ask Jamey to send them a bottle of champagne -- compliments of the house, so they wouldn't end up paying attention to anyone other than themselves -- but then decided that they were doing perfectly well on their own.  And indeed, they were still chattering away after I had my dessert and cappuccino, signed the bill, and wobbled out of the restaurant and headed for my room.

I did learn one thing from the evening's experience: beware first impressions.