Nina and Tim Zagat wrote a kind of crabby piece about restaurant service in the new Atlantic Food Channel here. It starts like this:

"Over the years that we've spent surveying hundreds of thousands of diners, one fact becomes clear: Service is *the* weak link in the restaurant industry. How do we know? Roughly 70% of all complaints we receive relate to service....Moreover, the average rating for food on our 30-point scale is usually two points higher than the average rating for service. Given the fact that identical people are voting, and that there are hundreds of thousands of them, this deficit is dramatic."

I think there's some truth to that, although it may be that generalized dissatisfaction with a meal (the decor, the pacing, the food itself) may get pinned on the service staff. So someone doesn't enjoy dinner--maybe it's too loud, or the food is too froufrou, whatever--and it's easy to distill more esoteric complaints into one about service. On the other hand, the Zagats may just be right.