Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

So Alan Richman has a barn-burner column in the new GQ about how he had a couple of good meals at M. Wells in Queens and then a horrible third one that led to a shocking exchange of e-mails between him and one of the restaurant’s owners, Sarah Obraitis, in which she accused him of giving a waitress “a hardy pat” on the backside. The crossfire led to much discussion on Twitter and Eater .

It also raised an important question about restaurants in America today. Over to Mr. Richman:

“Critics like me deserve some blame for the current proliferation of impossibly low service standards in so many casual New York restaurants,” he wrote in the column. “We tend not to censure lackadaisical conduct, thinking this is what customers want and that we would appear out of touch if we disapproved. In fact, the article I was planning to write most likely wouldn’t have dwelled on the egregious manners I’d encountered. I wish I had never been so forgiving in my reviews of New York restaurants. I should long ago have paid attention to this disastrous decline in service. Casualness in restaurants does not automatically make customers feel more relaxed. It often has the opposite effect.”

Is this true, do you think? Is good service in restaurants on the decline? (Certainly the presence of cloth napkins and tablecloths is!) Or was the poor service Mr. Richman said he received at M. Wells simply a fluke? I have seen great service in rough restaurants (Fatty ‘Cue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, comes to mind); and terrible service in luxe surroundings (this well-regarded old dinosaur uptown I’ve been going to where the waiters are just awful). I have experienced the amateurish quality of service at new restaurants in the middle of a rush (see M. Wells, actually), and the hateful quality of service at new restaurants experiencing stillbirth (have you been to this BLT Bar and Grill in the Financial District?).

But it seems to me that Mr. Richman’s “disastrous decline in service” has been going on since there were critics to grouse about servers, and servers to grouse right back.

Tell us what you think in the comments.