Vaut le Déplacement

A customer whose visits from Leesburg require a 40- to 45-minute drive paid me a great compliment last weekend when she said to me, "C'est vaut le déplacement." The literal translation is that it is worth the trip or drive, worth going out of one's way. It's the unspoken part of this comment, however, in which the great compliment lies. This phrase alludes to the famous Guide Michelin which rates restaurants on how worthy they are of going out of one's way to dine. And for the compliment, I thank her.

More and more of our customers come out of their way to dine with us. When we do a scatter plot of telephone area codes of our reservation book, we see naturally that our highest traffic is from the local area code. The other large concentrations of customers come in descending order from Northern Virginia, the DC metro area, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia. I want to thank all these people for going a long way out of their way to dine with us; a lot of them are driving 2 and 3 hours to get here.

We'll do all we can to keep it worth going out of your way.