Have you seen this contraption? It's a 7 inch tall interactive, touchscreen restaurant menu tablet from E La Carte.

And it might very well be part of your dining future.

My feelings toward it are mixed, at best.

I am historically resistant to technological change. I quietly mourned the compact disc's triumph over the long playing record; I didn't see the necessity of a laptop computer when my desktop one worked perfectly fine; I was forcibly enrolled in Twitter by a friend; and the only reason I purchased a cell phone was because I would not be able to find my boyfriend in a crowd of 20,000 people 500 miles from home without one.

And yet I have come to embrace all of these technologies. In fact, I am physically embracing my computer as I type this on top of my lap. With my phone in my pocket. Playing downloaded music. The Twitter feed, however, is turned off. I have my limits.

I have the feeling that ordering from a touchscreen menu is one of those limits.

It isn't as though I haven't done it before. Anyone who has taken a Virgin Airlines flight has seen these screens. We pull up the food menu, place our index fingers to the screen to make our choices, then swipe our credit cards along the bottom of the tablet. Shortly thereafter, a flight attendant appears with what we have ordered. It isn't exactly magic, but it is certainly efficient.

However, I do to miss being asked the question "Chicken or fish?" I may get my cold falafel sandwich quickly, but I never feel very good about it. There's a subtle but important difference between being handed a tray of food and being served it.

The people at E La Carte state that their menu tablet isn't meant to replace those who serve. Rather, it is "meant to make the hospitality experience more convenient, social, and fun for the guests and more profitable for the restaurant operator."

With the tablet, guests can "order, pay, play games, and give feedback straight from their seats."

According to the product's makers, there are three main benefits for the restaurant:

1. Boost average check size by up to 10% through up-selling, pictures, and impulse orders.

2. Improving customer retention with easy-to-use loyalty and survey interactions.

3. Improve service by quick payment, retaining customer order history, and games at the table.

How on earth can a computer up-sell better than a human being? I think I need this explained to me.

When my friend Roy alerted me to this new piece of technology, my first reaction as both a career server at a fine dining establishment and someone resistant to new technology was to view the E La Carte tablet as vilely impersonal and a threat to my profession. Over the last 24 hours, however, I have calmed myself as I weigh what I imagine the cons-- and the pros-- are of this particular piece of equipment.

There are three important components a good restaurant must supply in order to provide its guests with a great dining experience (just pick up a Zagat guide and look at their rating criteria if you don't believe me):

1. Great food

2. Congenial décor

3. Excellent service

Though the menu tablet aims to provide photos of all the menu items, I am wondering if its creators have taken into account the fact that someone is going to have to style, photograph, photo edit, and upload a photo every time a new dish is created.

Substitutions? E La Carte states that guests can make alterations to their chosen menu item through this product. Simple enough when a guest might prefer mashed potatoes to french fries with their Porterhouse, but what about more complex-- or outrageous-- requests? Is it time then for a server to appear at the table with the bad news?

Computer says no.

As for décor, I get irritated when the people I eat with leave their smart phones on the table. I don't want a 7 inch piece of electronics shining at me as I dine. A candle on the table and the smiles of my companions are all the glow I need, thank you very much.

And what about the human component of the dining experience that this gadget swears it is not intended to replace? As a server, one of the most important parts of my job is to form a personal connection with my guest. Argue all you like, but there is a certain amount of server/guest bonding that happens within the first few moments of interaction. When I say hello and ask someone if they'd like a drink or if they just want to settle in a moment and catch their breath, I'm not just offering to go fetch them something-- I'm giving them the sense that they are going to be well taken care of.

The nuances of human vs. computer interaction are too many to get into in this post.

I understand that both restaurant owners and restaurant guests can benefit from such a menu in cases where one is looking merely to satisfy one's hunger quickly and efficiently, like at a corporate chain restaurant such as Applebee's (which is rumored to be adopting the tablets). Such venues already have standardized menu items that are photographically illustrated.

Touchscreen menus might also be a terrific boon for people who, for varying reasons, are unable to communicate well with spoken words. I've seen what an iPad can do for kids with autism. Could such interactive menus also help them gain confidence in ordering dinner? It's an idea that intrigues me.

They may also be helpful to those unfamiliar with a particular cuisine and/or language (ever been to a Vietnamese restaurant and felt entirely helpless?). The idea of a computer with a built-in glossary of terms and ingredients (or a translator) is an intriguing one.

And just think about how it could transform a wine list. 86'ed items could be immediately removed from the menu. Can't remember what grapes are in that Grüner Veltliner? (hint: it's Grüner Veltliner, but you would be spared the humiliation of asking such a question if you could simply click over to a glossary or related link.) Of course, the drawback is that one could get so lost in so much information, that one might never be able to choose. Or put the damned menu down.

I think a tool such as the E La Carta has some excellent possibilities, but not in the way it's being marketed. In addition to the ideas previously mentioned, I think that such a product used as a menu would cut down on the need for paper menus that must be thrown away or otherwise recycled every time they are either dirtied or in need of updating.

But then you should give your order to a human being and remove the electronic device from the dinner table. Talk to him. Ask for her opinion. Just interact. Technology can be a wonderful thing, but not at the expense of interpersonal exchange. It has its time and its place.

The other day I was riding to work on the bus. When I had taken my seat, I reflexively pulled out my iPhone to play a game of cribbage or stare at Facebook updates or do something-- anything-- to shut out my surroundings. Then something wonderful happened:

My battery died.

I was alarmed by how helpless I felt and my immediate thought was "Now what am I supposed to do?" And then I felt like a fool. I looked at my fellow passengers on the bus. Every person on it my age or younger was using their smart phone. None of them were smiling. It was just the old Chinese ladies at the front who were chatting and laughing away. I had no idea what they were saying, but they seemed to be doing perfectly fine without a touchscreen at arm's length.

It struck me then that this is precisely what we're all doing when we can't manage to pull our eyes away from our gadgets-- we are keeping people at arm's length. And that personal computers aren't, well, personable.

We spend so much of our time in front of computers-- I know I do. Working as a waiter is a marvelous antidote to technology because every night I am forced to talk to people I've never met before. I ask them questions like "How are you?" and "Where are you from?" Granted, I get paid to do so, but it's something I actually look forward to. It pulls me out of myself and, for a few hours every evening, my focus is on the welfare of other people.

And I look for the same thing when I am the one who is dining. I want to feel welcomed as a guest, not merely a customer. However much of a fantasy that might be at times, I want to believe it. I want to thank the person who placed that martini in front of me. I want to talk to a human being, not press buttons (unless they happen to the the emotional buttons of my dining partner). I want to feel as though I am being taken care of.

I just don't happen to think that's possible with a computer.

What are your thoughts? Like the idea? Hate it?

A week or so ago, I had dinner with an old friend and her family at a very, very tony restaurant here in San Francisco. The layout of the space was beautiful-- everything was styled to the teeth: the flowers, the décor, the enormous boards of cheese which sat near the bar, offering a come on to the men in the general vicinity that was nearly as pungent and gooey as those from the perfume-soaked women who jockeyed for prime barstools. Even the service staff looked as if it had been culled from the pages of a Brooks Brothers catalogue-- they were clean cut, attractive, and wearing dark, conservative suits.

Everything looked perfect.

When we sat down at our table, we discovered a delightful surprise-- the large, hard bound menus revealed a personal message: "Happy Birthday Jill" on the inside. She was touched. I think. Anyway, she was pleased.

We were excited about the menu's offerings. There in small black print were things I'd never had, but had always wanted to try, but lacked either the energy or knowhow to actually hunt down and cook for myself. Things like rampion and fiddlehead ferns.

The sommelier was spot on, too. I told him what part of the world we felt like drinking from, what we were willing to spend, and what sort of basic qualities we wanted. He returned promptly with exactly what I was looking for.

The meal itself was delightful. The flavors and textures and plating were gorgeous, if a little on the meagre side, but that was to be expected in such a place. We were having a grand old time. Unfortunately, there was one element that completely fell flat on its face, as far as I was concerned:

The service.

The waiter was polite. Almost too much so. He was deferential to the point of seeming afraid to approach the table as we talked. When we asked his opinion on specific dishes, he didn't seem to have any, yet when someone at the table asked what his favorite items were, he told us something to the effect that everything was delicious.

And when asking us if we had made our decisions, he made the fatal (with me) error of saying something akin to "Have we decided on our dinner?"

Funny, I never thought to ask if he was hungry. I thought of asking another waiter if he could pull up an extra chair so that we could make it dinner for five.

What on earth was he so afraid of? Three lovely Texas woman? Me? Is that what made him shy away from the table so much that he couldn't manage to fill our wine glasses when they were going on empty? Was he simply less interested in us because we were more than likely not spending as much money as his other tables?

Sitting there in my plush banquette, I wondered to myself this question:

What the hell does it take to get a great waiter in this town? I have had so few. The only answer I could come up with is this:

Luck. Pure, unholy luck.

It doesn't seem to matter much what type of venue you are patronizing. High end restaurants are no guarantee of great service, though one's expectations are higher when there. Boulevard? I've had both great service and totally lack-luster service. Masa's? I was lucky enough to have someone I knew take care of me. We were the only people in the place that seemed to be having a good time. The French Laundry? Don't get me started. One of the best servers I have ever encountered in this city was at a little breakfast place in the Haight. I wanted to kiss her and give her all of my money. At least I had enough courage to do the latter.

Of course, I am a professional waiter by trade, so I tend to notice everything happening around me when dining out. It's an occupational hazard. I do not, however, think my standards are sky high. Nor do I think they are universal. My ideas of great service might differ from yours. Here are my particular needs and idiosyncrasies:

My ideal server...

• Is confident in his knowledge of the food and wine he serves.

• Has opinions.

• Is not afraid to either approach my table nor make menu suggestions.

• Is friendly and warm, but not over-sharing.

• Does not say "How are we this evening?" or "Have we decided yet?" He uses the plural "you."

• Does not tell me her name when she walks up to the table for the first time. If she is wonderful and engaging, I will ask for her name as well as give her my own.

• Does not try to sell me something right off the bat. Rather, he says "Hello."

• Lets me know if she feels I am ordering too much food.

• Asks me if the temperature of my wine is good and if I would prefer my white wine on the table or on ice.

• Keeps my wine glass filled, but does not over-pour.

• Is as kind to the table next to me as she is to me.

• Does not look disheartened when I order a bottle of wine that costs less than $100.

• Claims an undramatic responsibility for any mishaps. Mistakes happen. They don't bother me.

• Acts as if he cares about what he's doing.

• Makes me feel welcome.

• Makes me feel as if I am being taken care of.

Frankly, it's that last bullet point that I want the most. When I dine out, I just want to be taken care of. Not coddled. Not ass-kissed. Just taken care of.

I mean, this is the hospitality industry I'm talking about, isn't it?

What do you expect from your servers? I'd really like to know. Of course, if you are one of those people who feels that a server should be seen and not heard, you may feel free to refrain from comment.

"Never touch a customer (#32)." "Do not curse (#45)." "Never refuse to substitute one vegetable for another (#20)." "Do not play brass bands (#93)."

In late October, as part of his start-up chronicle for the New York Times's You're The Boss blog, Bruce Buschel posted what he called "a modest list of dos and don'ts" for servers at the Bridgehampton, N.Y. seafood restaurant he's opening on April Fool's Day. He included the above nuggets, along with 96 others. Far from "modest," the list, laid out in two parts, touched off frantic comment-slinging in New York Times-land. Interest grew as links to the article and rejoinders from far corners of the food and business blogospheres ping-ponged through Twitter and Facebook. I first saw Buschel's piece on Facebook. The morning of the second part's publication (a week after the first), a friend posted it to his profile and dissed it hard ("what an asshole"). A former bus boy at Per Se and the original Momofuku as well as a third year law school student, my friend is familiar with both the industry in question and argument as a general preoccupation. He brought both strands of experience to bear on his brief take. Combing the comments to Buschel's posts, I found that reactions were typically extreme and severe, running the gamut from similarly negative ("Who died and made this guy the bossy know-it-all?", for example) to laudatory ("This should be a must for every server and restaurant employee to memorize."). Comment-writers are a special breed. A certain kind of person has the time to read widely, strong opinions on most subjects, and a compulsion to dive into whatever fray they sense forming. Comment-writers rarely stand in for the larger population, just a subset of opinionated comment-writers who happen to have read the same thing. This is especially true when the piece provoking debate appears in the New York Times, a journal of record frequently accused of catering to an elitist readership.

In this case, some of the entries -- a hearty portion, actually -- concern a wee wafer of the food and hospitality universe -- nice restaurants for dates, expense accounts, vacations, and special occasions -- specifically, the sorts of places I imagine the writer frequents with more regularity than me. After all, the proprietor of a barbecue restaurant in rural South Carolina would not be compelled to offer olive oil as well as butter with bread (#19), and if some asshole from New York skated through and dumbly asked for it, he'd have to send him on his way -- maybe to Olive Garden, where bread and oil are endless. Buschel anticipates that critique: "I realize that every deli needs a wisecracking waiter, most pizza joints can handle heavy metal, and burgers always taste better when delivered by a server with tattoos and tongue piercing(s)." Aside from his frail and stunted knowledge of delis, pizzerias, and burger places, Buschel's advice ostensibly only concerns plans for his own restaurant, an organic vegetable and fish dispensary with nary a hoof nor a feather on the menu; yet the act of publishing his list suggests he thinks it has universal value.

Of course, Bruce Buschel doesn't even know what he's doing. He's a novice, you see, a dilettante, something he made sure to lay out in his very first post, a question-and-answer session with a hypothetical naysayer. He's never taken an order. He's never been tipped worse than a washroom attendant. His experience with restaurants is limited to dining in them. He's unfettered by an intimate knowledge of the industry. How refreshing! His do's and dont's reflect his own preferences, and perhaps those of his friends; when they're pressed into service at his own establishment, he's assuming diners will feel the same way. I'm not hating on #5. "Tables should be level without anyone asking." Oh god, yes -- shaky tables are the pits. No one wants to spend the first five minutes of any meal anywhere trying to fold a paper towel under a wobbly leg. Others are absurd. For example, if a guest "goes gaga" over dish, no server should have to ask the chef for the recipe on the excessively complimentary guest's behalf (#97). The guest should be told to chill out and come back soon.

I eat out a lot, both recreationally and professionally, and I have my own preferences too, though I would hesitate to open a restaurant and impose them on guests and employees. I'm a wreck, basically. I send mixed signals. I like to be left alone, for starters, but I hate having an empty glass. Fill it frequently enough and I'll fall asleep before dinner is over. I dread the sight of a beaming server approaching to check in with me. I am sensitive, and I anticipate condescension well before it happens, and I know it happens all the time. Excessively nice servers make me feel bad, like I should go get my food myself and share it with them, maybe feed it to them, bite by bite. I don't like anyone acting like they're catering to my needs, but I don't mind them being catered to just a little bit. I don't care how fine a dining experience is supposed to be; I like to hang my own jacket on the back of my chair and put my napkin in my own lap. And I don't like to have anything to complain about because I can't stand the possibility of conflict -- at least with strangers. I have seen people pitch fits in restaurants over service. Interestingly, my friend who hated Buschel's column is himself a very demanding consumer. In college, hung-over, at a breakfast place, he once sent back a ham-and-Swiss omelette because it came topped with inauthentic white American cheese instead of Emmentaler. A year or two later, he cleared a booth at a Manhattan diner to exchange screams with a waitress after he refused to pay for fries he received and ate but didn't order. He had points to make in both instances, but neither situation would have riled me. A white American omelette is authentic in northern Ohio, and fries are always nice to have. He should have ordered them in the first place and saved the waitress the trouble of guessing he'd probably like eating them.

Food and service are two very different things intertwined in the dining experience. I'm food-focused, and apart from my admitted quirks, rarely find that service rubs me the wrong way unless the food also sucks. Four years or so ago, I had a strange, sneering server at Perbacco, but I turned the other cheek. It was full of coppa. On several occasions, my girlfriend and I shifted nervously through meals at the lovable and lamentably late Vogalonga Trattoria. Our regular waiter was capable and friendly to me, but strangely, when he took her order, he refused to look at her. He would stare into my eyes awkwardly and ask her what she wanted. How weird, I thought every time it happened, but we still went back. Another time, we waited for a table at The Front Porch for over 45 minutes, and then, upon finally sitting down and ordering, waited once again for an hour before the first scrap of food arrived. I didn't give a shit about the fried chicken by the time it came; I just wanted to bail, which was why it was annoying that the server kept trying to make us eat dessert.

Restaurants love to offer free dessert when something goes wrong with your meal. The idea is to soothe you, and send you off with a sweet taste in your mouth, instead of fuming over the under-cooked chicken you sent back. I don't get it. If I want dessert -- which I usually don't -- I order it. If I don't order it, I'm full. Buschel should add a #101 on the subject: when someone screws up something, comp cocktails instead of dessert. Then again, my lady and I dined at Delfina the night before Christmas Eve, and at the conclusion of our meal, received a free dessert -- a lemon panna cotta, I believe. The food that night was great, if a little less stunning than it's been in the past, but this made it better -- even though we'd already had plenty to eat. We had no idea why we'd been selected for such a treat. We saw no quivery cylinders squishing across other plates in the vicinity. They must have known my status, I joked on the way home. Was our server's generosity a random display of holiday spirit? Had we failed to notice something terribly amiss with our meal? We could thing of nothing. Buschel, take note: comp something even when no one screws up -- even if its dessert (#102).

In a world of small plates and share plates, it's typical that meals are ordered in a way that is atypical of traditional dining. I frankly can't remember the last time that I was with a group who each ordered a salad, an entree and a dessert without sharing or splitting plates. More typical these days is a meal that I had Monday night at A16: two of us shared an appetizer, a pizza, a small pasta and three sides.

"How would you like that to come out?" most servers ask me. My typical answer? "However you'd like, just not all at once." I say this last point with emphasis and look them straight in the eye. A quick way to get me in a bad mood is to deliver so many plates to my table that we are juggling plates and stressed to get plates off the table to make room.

I find that most places I go to are very good at asking the question about coursing. But whether it's followed is a gamble. The successfully coursed meal at A16 came out in three rounds -- the appetizer and a side, the pizza, and then the pasta and two sides.

One night at a Valencia street restaurant known for great cocktails and excellent food, we ordered a similarly random meal. That night, I was looking forward to a leisurely paced meal and we had some ideas of how the meal should come out due to wine pairings with different dishes. We talked to the server about it and he even went so far as to tell us when he would have the kitchen "fire" certain courses, and spent a couple of minutes confirming the order with us.

The meal started to come out immediately and too quickly. The courses were completely confused, and the server was notably absent. The food was delicious. The meal pacing left us agitated and annoyed. What could have been a really stellar experience was made only above average due to the way that our food was presented to us.

The worst example of coursing recently was at a newly three-star restaurant in SOMA where the plates were too large for a two-top and came out all at once. We had to move some plates to an adjacent table just to make room to eat. It would have been comical if I wasn't so annoyed. When we mentioned the problem to the server, she just said "Oh, that's the way the kitchen does it sometimes."

It's time for San Franciscans to stop letting this sloppy coursing slide. Gone are the days of an entree with a choice of soup or salad, baked potato or fries. At least in San Francisco, we've been seeing nontraditional menus for several years now. And managers need to be training servers and kitchens on how to handle orders in order to make the experience comfortable for the diner. Restaurants must evaluate every order and consider it on its own for the best pacing and coursing. This may sound like nitpicking, but we are lucky to live in a city where we have numerous choices for excellent food -- it affords us the leisure of making coursing and pacing a deciding factor when choosing a restaurant.