Advice Traction

Recently, my wife and I ate at a local pub (actually a pub). One we both like, and since they now have two locations, we've tried the other, we like that one too. So we're lukewarm fans, loyal in the eyes of a business that might chart the once or twice a month we eat there, but not so loyal that we wouldn't boycott the place if something went wrong.
My wife loves the chef's salad. It has a lot of healthy stuff, good flavors, textures... the highlight of that particular dish is a chunk of imported bleu cheese.
On this visit, we had a cute 20 year old blond waitress who I would describe as mildly engaged in our dining experience, and a tentative manager who came over and asked the awkward "Is everything OK?" ... less than mildly engaged.
So when my wife asked for more of the bleu cheese, (after waiting to get attention) the waitress happily said "Sure, no problem"
She comes back, after an acceptable wait, and sets a small disposable solo cup with a scant 1/2 bite of the cheese on the table, apologizes for the small portion, and then says "Sorry about the amount, the chef gets really weird about his bleu cheese - Is there anything else I can get for you?"

I knew this was something I wanted to write about because I keep thinking about it. There are so many possible topics, many near and dear to my heart, like; upselling at the table, helping the gen Y'ers learn how to engage, designing a memorable dining experience, the value of loyal customers (let alone evangelists) vs. 75 cents worth of cheese, the role of the floor manager in a service operation, portion sizing... the list goes on.

What has stuck with me is the guilty feeling of not helping them. To offer some advice, to give them something really valuable (customer insight) with no strings attached. Instead, I left cynically joking about the chef and his possible OCD involving cheese, what the poor waitress must have endured on a previous request for more cheese, the clueless manager...
As I think about it, what seems to be missing is the traction one needs to give advice. Not only to the recipient but also for the advisor. To receive advice means to trust the source, to offer advice means to risk being reduced to Charlie Brown's teacher - a blabbing pain in the ass.

How cool would it be to receive real advice from customers? I'd like to think that I could handle the cynical wake of people in my business, and that I could allow them to have traction with me so they would feel safe giving me the real stuff. It's probably because I have taken advice that was hard to hear, and then made the advisor out to be a jerk behind their back that I worry about my own ability to hear the real stuff.

I'm going to keep thinking about how to let customers know it's safe to give me the real stuff.