This week’s question comes from Jessica Shahin of the District who wants to know:

Why is it that when a restaurant is practically empty, they nonetheless seat you right next to a table with patrons?

Funny you should ask, Jessica. I had this exact experience several months ago at Viridian near Logan Circle. My wife, Carrie, and I had stopped in to see how chef Michael Hartzer was doing after leaving Ray’s the Classics in Silver Spring. It was a Tuesday night—maybe around 9, not exactly prime-dining time—and the restaurant was almost as bare as the whitewashed, museumlike walls at Viridian. A few folks were lingering over meals at tables by the front windows.

The first thing the host did was to tell us to wait in the bar. If this was a ploy to get us to order drinks, it was a stupid one. I would have ordered the same thing at the table—at any one of the vast ocean of open tables. Five minutes later, our table was suddenly ready. The host dropped us off at a two-top near the front window, near the other diners.

I decided to buzz Viridian general manager Kevin Blonshine to get the scoop—for Jessica and for my own peace of mind—but he was away. In his place, bar manager Naveen Sidhu was serving as acting GM. He was clearly nervous about saying anything stupid in Blonshine’s stead, but he need not worry. Here’s what he had to say in response to Jessica’s question:

“We generally tend not to do that,” Sidhu says. “If a restaurant is empty or not as full as you’d like it to be, it would be at the diner’s request where they’d like to sit. We offer that constantly….We can assign servers to different places. That doesn’t really make a difference.”

I guess I should have made my confession at the start of our conversation, before Sidhu gave his answer, but I waited until he finished to mention that Carrie and I had lived out the very scenario in Jessica’s question earlier this year at Viridian. I wondered if the restaurant didn’t have a policy about seating customers together by the window.

“It’s definitely not a policy,” Sidhu responds. “It’s just any normal business decision that you would make. You want full exposure to the street. Obviously in a situation in a restaurant like we have, we have large windows up front. You want to see that’s there some exposure to the restaurant from guests [who] are walking by, so perhaps that you can attract more walk-ins.”

But, Sidhu adds, “If you had requested to sit in a different area, there’s no way that we wouldn’t have done that request for you.”

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This week’s question comes from Joe Jeral in Takoma Park who asks:

As a psychiatrist, I learned in medical school that the sense of smell is different than all the other senses. While vision and touch and hearing all relay information to the cerebral cortex for an ‘intellectual-level’ processing, smell information is transmitted directly to the lower, more ‘animalistic,’ and more emotional parts of the brain, without the intellectual processing. Keeping in mind the images of wine experts smelling wine passionately, I’d love to know how they would respond to this fact.

First of all, I’d like to thank Dr. Joe for sending in a question that has no question. After reading the query to a pair of sommeliers, I felt like Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney on SNL: Remember when you were with the Beatles? And you were supposed to be dead and there’s all these clues that like you’d play some song backwards and it’d say, like, ‘Paul is dead’ and everyone thought you were dead or something. That was a hoax, right?

Paul: Yeah, I wasn’t really dead.

Just messing with you, Joe. Actually, I love the question, such as it is. I love it because it implies that the snobby oenophile’s language for the nose of a wine—”used saddle leather,” perhaps, or “barnyard” or even “cat piss”—emanates from the nonrational side of their brain. Or, to put it less politely, it implies that these folks are tapping into their shit-eating monkey brains. Now, I didn’t express all that when I put the so-called question to the sommeliers. I just read it straight up. Here’s what Derek Brown from Komi had to say:

“Wow, yeah, I think that’s definitely true,” he says. “When we’re talking about the sense of smell, we usually start with something very simple, like, I’ll say, ‘This smells like rosewater’ or ‘This smells like peach’ or whatever it is. And then it’ll frequently go off into a story or into something a little more complex. For instance, Gewurtztraminer, which is one of the most fragrant of all the varietals, tends to have this very floral smell to it, and that comes off almost like old lady’s perfume. So it’ll go into stories that are a little more elaborate. So in that sense, I believe it’s true.”

Sebastian Zutant, sommelier at the new wine-centric Proof restaurant in Penn Quarter, agrees with Brown that smells tend to be more subjective than objective, more emotional than rational. But in the eating business, where potentially anything you stick in your mouth can set off an emotional trip wire, I wondered aloud to Zutant if irrational responses were all that bad when describing the nose of a wine. I mean, maybe we shouldn’t dismiss or degrade these emotional reactions, even when they’re coming from some of the world’s worst pinky-waving snobs. (And just for the record: I am not, in any way, calling Brown or Zutant such things.)

“When you pretty [wines] up with words and descriptions, sure, it certainly sounds nicer, but I don’t think that [the descriptions should be] degraded or downsized by simply just having a more animal reaction to a wine,” Zutant says. I think it’s sort of natural to do so, and not only that, I certainly don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

So what’s the strangest, most emotional thing, you’ve heard come out of your mouth when describing a wine?

“Yesterday, actually somebody told me that one of the wines I love smelled and tasted like baby vomit,” Zutant says.

Did you agree?

“I didn’t want to,” he says. “I call wines ‘funky.’ I call them ‘dirty.’ I have no problem with using words that are sort of taboo. But ‘baby vomit’ is a little much. And I love the wine. It’s a grüner veltliner that comes from a much warmer year….It was an interesting description.”

That animal reaction, in other words, is one Zutant would like to hog tie and roast over a spit.

To submit a question to Ask Tim, just e-mail me at asktim@washingtoncitypaper.com.

This week’s question comes from Kate Antoniades of Gaithersburg, who asks:

“I always like to tip servers at least 20 percent, but lately I’ve been hearing that ‘20 percent is the new 15 percent.’ Is this true, or maybe just a high-end restaurant thing?”

This is a tricky question because of the way the American restaurant industry has positioned wait service: These employees, often expected to understand every nuance of the kitchen and every bottle of wine on the menu, must meet every diner’s goddamn unspoken expectations at every table. That’s a heavy burden, and if they don’t succeed to your satisfaction, you stiff ‘em. That’s the way the merit system works for servers in this country. They must perform for their cash, organ-grinder monkeys right at your table.

But the issue is more complex than that. The fact is that the cost of living keeps rising for all of us—I believe my gas bill this winter came with a ransom note—and by the fact that tips often have to be split with busboys, bartenders, and runners. While you have the right to stiff your waiter or waitress for poor service, you should also consider the ethical side of this monetary exchange (or lack thereof). Each dollar you withhold is one less for these people to live off. Does your employer stiff you every time you spend the afternoon reading The Onion online or surfing for porn?

My position is this: I always give 20 percent. I give more when the service is great.

I also put this question to two veteran restaurateurs—Ashok Bajaj, owner of a number of restaurants in the District including Rasika, The Oval Room, and Ardeo; and Manuel Iguina, owner of Mio and former GM at Café Atlántico and Restaurant Nora.

Bajaj: “The answer is ‘yes’…20 percent is the new 15 percent. I think it started about five or six years ago—I’m just speaking from my memory—after the Internet boom when everything was going well. Everyone was looking for better service…So then it sort of became the norm. People were tipping between 15 and 20 percent, and gradually, the word gets around and 20 percent is the new tip. And that’s exactly what it is.”

But with the average check price going up, I ask Bajaj, isn’t the 20 percent tip a double whammy on the diner’s pocketbook? “Everything has changed, Tim,” Bajaj says. “I tell you if you really want to look at the economics of this…You could get a decent apartment for $800; now it’s $1,400 for a one-bedroom…Salmon [used to] be $3.95; now it’s $8.50. So everything’s relative. With inflation, everything’s gone up.”

Iguina has a slightly different take on the 20-percent threshold: “That is a tough question. I’m a 20 percent tipper, if not more, if I’m blown away by somebody. But let me give you something that happened to me the other day. I went to this place, and I didn’t get any kind of service that I wanted, and they put an 18-percent tip on the check and it was a party of four…I was a little bit upset about it, because I think the gratuity should be optional for service.”

“If I do an average in my restaurant here for tips,” he continues, “it is 20 percent minimum. So unofficially or not set in stone, people are tipping that amount. It makes me very happy because the waiters, they make good money. They earn their money, and [if] they get their 20 percentage, they’re going to be happy working here…But it should always be optional. There should not be a minimum or a maximum.”

At the same time, Iguina admits that he always leaves at least 15 percent, no matter how bad the service is, because he knows that servers “live on tips.”

To submit a question to Ask Tim, just e-mail me at asktim@washingtoncitypaper.com. To download this week’s Young & Hungry podcast, click here.

This week’s question comes from reader Heather Shorter from Takoma Park, who wants to know the answer to the following:

I am a big fan of the lost art of canning and preserving, and my question is: Which chefs around town make their own pickles, preserves, etc., either from home use or for their restaurants?

Heather, helpful to the last sentence, even supplies me with a starting point: Chef John Wabeck, who recently left Firefly to return to New Heights in Woodley Park, where he first rose to executive chef in the late 1990s. Sure enough, Wabeck does pickling.

“I’m a big acid freak,” Wabeck says, then quickly clarifies, “with vinegar, not the stuff you put on your tongue. So basically [pickling is] always good, especially because you’re dealing with so many natural sugars in summer. Pickling just gives a nice balance.”

Wabeck isn’t the only one doing pickling at New Heights. Co-owner Kavita Singh is an expert at Indian-style pickling, which doesn’t rely on vinegar. As such, Wabeck says, at least half the dishes at the restaurant “have something that’s either preserved or pickled or cured or something like that,” including the Indian vegetarian thali, which always includes “some kind of pickles on there.”

“We were making mango pickles last week,” Wabeck says. “And mango pickles are great, raw green mangos. It’s like making sauerkraut. You add a bit of salt and then it just ferments and sours and pickles itself.”

You’ll also find pickled okra with the barbecue Berkshire pork tenderloin and preserved shiitakes with the Maple Leaf Farms duck breast, among other pickled items at New Heights.

Wabeck, as you might suspect, isn’t the only acid freak in the area. Morou Ouattara at Farrah Olivia, Cathal Armstrong at Restaurant Eve, and Peter Smith at PS 7’s are among the local chefs who do their own pickling and canning.

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The inaugural question for our new Ask Tim feature comes from Sarah Anne Austin—cue the fireworks and Sousa music!—who wants an answer to the following:

Restaurant chefs seem to be untouchable, at least to a peon like myself. How do I get the head chef of a restaurant to “swing by” my table, short of having dinner with a head of state?

There’s no easy answer to this question because it assumes a number of things: that the chef tied to the restaurant actually spends most of his or her time there; that the chef is not working a station that night, which would rule out any sort of visit; and that the chef is not dealing with some other higher priority at the time of the request. These, and other issues, could prevent a chef from making an appearance tableside.

I put Sarah’s question to a pair of chefs—Frank Ruta, the James Beard Award-winning toque at Palena who’s famous for practically living in the kitchen, and Jeff Black, a man who oversees four different restaurants, including Black’s Bar and Kitchen and BlackSalt.

Ruta: “The way the question would probably be coming down is, ‘Look, Table 22 is somebody that really wants to meet you, a fan….Can you come up and say hi?’ Chances are I would say, ‘I can’t make it right now.’ But maybe on the way out, I can just stop at the top of the stairs and get them on their way to the front door and make it just a brief hello and that’s it. If they had something that they wanted to discuss particularly about their meal, I think that’s a different situation, and I would probably be more inclined to go to the table and discuss whatever their concerns are or, you know, whatever their compliments might be.”

Black: “The best way, again, is if [the request] is after the busiest part of the night….I’ve had people send me a glass of wine and say, ‘We’ve had this nice bottle of wine, and we want you to have a sip, and wanted to know if you’d stop by and say hello.’ Of course. These are people that are really into food, and they’re really into the experience, and they’re really into the restaurant. They’re fun to talk to.”

So what you’re saying, Chef, is that a glass of wine helps?

Black: “It certainly wouldn’t hurt. At least with me anyway.”

To submit a question to Ask Tim, just e-mail me at asktim@washingtoncitypaper.com. The tougher the question, the better.