Face-to-Face With the "Check, Please" Effect
By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 2, 2007 3:15PM
The “‘Check, Please’ effect” is defined as “a surge in business for the three highlighted restaurants (featured on any given episode) after the show appears with later small surges whenever the program is rerun, which is multiple times on WTTW.” The term “surge” is a generous one. If unprepared, a smaller restaurant is mobbed and taxed beyond its capabilities. Albany Park’s Noon-O-Kabob is often presented as exhibit “A” for the effect’s existence. More recently we’ve heard from friends and readers about the effect at places we frequent, like May St. Café, Haro, and Cuatro. A friend's visit to the Heart of Italy two weeks ago to eat at Haro turned into a two-hour wait, at which point they gave up and went to La Fontanella instead. We never had the opportunity to experience the “‘Check, Please’ effect” firsthand.
Until yesterday. We made our way down to Chatham to enjoy a bite, the sights (read: the beautiful waitresses) and sounds (continuous Orchestra Baobab in the background) at Yassa, a gem of a storefront restaurant (716 E. 79th Street, open 7 days from 11 a.m. – 11 p.m., 773-488-5599 and 773-488-9630) that specializes in Senegalese cuisine and — until Friday night’s airing of “Check, Please” — was one of our favorite hidden treasures. It was around 2 p.m., well past the point of any reasonable lunch/brunch rush, and we readied ourselves for an afternoon with some dakhine (da-keen-ay) — a savory lamb goulash made with rice, onions and beans, tied together with a velvety peanut butter sauce that can feed Chicagoist for days at $9 — and the Sunday Sun-Times. However, once we walked into the door and assessed the clientele, the first thought to pop in our head was, “So, this where all the white people at.” There were too many there for it to be more than a coincidence.
We sat ourselves in the larger dining room, at a table capable of seating eight. It was the only table open and was occupied by one other customer at the time, a lovely woman who grew up and lives near Chatham but had never stopped at Yassa. She watches “Check, Please” regularly, but until yesterday had never visited any of the restaurants featured on the program. At her husband’s suggestion, she finally took the plunge. From the look on her face as she dug into her grilled tilapia dinner, she was glad her husband chided her into action. She talked a lot about how her husband might not be able to handle the spicier menu items, which was when we mentioned the dakhine as something that might not affect his constitution too badly, should she decide to bring him to Yassa for a future visit.
Some time later we were joined at the table by a couple who frequent the show’s featured restaurants regularly and hold very specific opinions about certain places. Little Village’s Mi Tierra, in their words, “sucked.” We took a photo of our nem appetizer ($5) — think of it as a Senegalese take on a Vietnamese spring roll, stuffed with shrimp, herbs, spices, and vermicelli — and after admitting that we write about food and drink, were soon inundated with questions about where to find good restaurants and cuisines from all three.
The questions came in handy. By the time we got around to explaining the differences between Mandarin and Taiwanese cuisines we’d been waiting close to forty-five minutes for our dakhine, and we all needed something to take our minds off the wait. The waitresses, to their credit, never let anyone see them sweat. Service at Yassa can be generously described as “leisurely” even before last week’s episode, which is one of the things we love about the place. But these young women knew about Yassa’s feature spot on “Check, Please” and exhibited the patience of saints as they quietly, politely explained to customers why they ran out of the chicken and beef brochettes (Senegalese kabobs, $9) and their signature natural juices ($2), and that the customers were not being ignored, even as evidence mounted to the contrary. It made for some tense situations at times as the couple was growing impatient with their wait, but these waitresses handled what should have been an untenable situation with ease.
When we finally received our dakhine we offered samples from our plate to our impromptu dining companions — the woman flying solo as evidence to bring back to her husband that we knew what we were talking about, the couple as reason to wait it out a bit longer for their chicken yassa and grilled tilapia. We doggy-bagged the remainder, paid the bill, and said our goodbyes to the couple, who had to re-place their order to a different waitress as we were leaving.
If we hadn’t seen Saturday’s repeat and were checking out Yassa for the first time, we would have been unrepentant about the service. And that’s one of the great things about “Check, Please.” The authoritative forums we tend to frequent like LTH and eGullet can create an echo chamber where we eventually wind up preaching to the already converted. “Check, Please” doesn't have that; it drops the pretense in favor of a more inclusive outlook. On its surface the show is what it says it is: it brings together three people to discuss their favorite restaurants. But “Check, Please” does more than that. It provides the impetus for viewers to leave the house and explore the city they call home. The one thing the three people at our table had in common was that they found out about Yassa from watching the show and were convinced enough to check it out for themselves. And anytime something is so compelling to make people from the north side of the city venture out to East 79th Street to eat is a good thing. If that makes us a booster, then we're guilty.
We just recommend anyone reading this to wait a few weeks before checking out Yassa. The crowds should be smaller by then.