The Thing You Say When You Do Not Know

A guest asks something. The person in front of them does not know.

What happens in the next three seconds has never been decided, and it varies enormously by who is standing there.

The four things people say

A guess. ⚠️ The most damaging, because it becomes a commitment. A guessed price or policy is honoured or argued about later.

"I'll check" — and then nothing. The intention was real. The shift got busy and the guest is still waiting.

"I don't know." Honest, and it leaves the guest holding the problem.

Deflection. "You'd have to ask the manager", with no manager produced. ⚠️ Reads as being passed around.

None of these is bad character. All four are what people do without a script.

What a good answer contains

Three parts, in about eight seconds:

Acknowledge the question is reasonable. "Good question" costs nothing and changes the tone.

Say what you will do. ⚠️ "Let me find out" with a specific next step — not a vague promise.

Say when. "Before you order" or "in two minutes" — a time, so the guest knows whether to wait.

Then actually do it. ⚠️ The part that fails. A promise to check that is not kept is worse than an honest "I don't know."

Making it possible to keep

The script only works if the answer is findable.

Know who has the answer, by role. ⚠️ Not "the manager" if the manager is not on.

Have the common answers written where staff are standing. The ten questions that come up repeatedly should not require finding anyone.

Make it acceptable to interrupt. ⚠️ If asking costs social capital, staff will guess instead — and the guessing is a symptom of that, not of laziness.

The guess is the one to eliminate

Worth saying explicitly to the team.

"Never guess on price, policy, or availability." ⚠️ A guessed answer is a promise the venue then has to honour or refuse — and both are worse than a short wait.

And back them when they say they will check. If checking is treated as slow service, they will stop and guess.

The manager's version

⚠️ Managers guess too, and with more authority, so the guess sticks harder.

"I'll confirm and come back to you" is available to everyone, including the person in charge, and it models the behaviour better than any instruction.

Afterwards

Every unanswerable question is a gap.

⚠️ Write it down — the same questions recur, and after a fortnight you have the list of what should be written where staff can see it.

Nobody does this, which is why the same question is unanswerable for years.

Three to hold

Questions staff could not answer, tallied for two weeks. ⚠️ The list is short and fixable.

Promises to check that were kept. ⚠️ Ask guests occasionally — the answer is worse than expected.

Whether the common answers are written anywhere. If they are in one person's head, everyone else is guessing by design.

Where the record has to sit

The answers have to be where the question is asked — the door, the table, the phone — and the gaps have to be recorded somewhere they will be reviewed. A shared document nobody opens mid-service fails both tests.

tasteck keeps pricing, courses and availability on the same screens used to take a booking, so the common answers are in front of whoever is being asked.

They were not being unhelpful. They were asked something they had no way to answer and no agreed thing to say, and three seconds is not long enough to invent one.