Very often regarding those articles, you read in the comments different varieties of "good service":

- may I ask: What does this actually mean?

I have never been to a "high class" or "fine dining" location, so maybe my expectations are in general not high.

My expectations are just simple: Give me the menu quickly, let me order quickly, let me eat and let me pay quickly.

Thats it. What do I miss?

EDIT: Im located in EU.

Good service is mostly invisible. Courses paced to how you're eating, not fired all at once or giving you 20 minute gaps between mains. Drinks refilled, plates cleared without asking. Reading the room and knowing when I want to chat or be left alone. Staff that know what their serving, whats in it, how it's cooked, what wine pairs well, etc.

That's a good question. Good service is something important to the overall dining experience, so much so, higher end places regard the "maître d'hôtel" aka the service/restaurant manager equal to the chef.

Great service is generally about "reading your mind": e.g. providing you with a replacement fork that you dropped without you needing to ask. Also, coordinating that "timing" you are after, perfectly. Good service is attentive without being overly present. If you ever ate somewhere in a sitdown restaurant and thought after "wow that was a great meal", service contributed to that.

There's a one star restaurant in my hometown. Not even expensive, it's about 60€ for a three-courses menu, so we try to go at least a few times a year.

It's really about reading the room. A good waiter won't bring the main of you're still finishing the wine that paired with your entrée. Won't come to pick the empty plates right in the middle of a lively conversation.

Things will land on and leave your table at the right time.

As with many other products, they do have an incentive to claim you're receiving something special.

Mostly yes, there's not much extra they can deliver besides a better staff to customer ratio.

It means nothing. Whoever writes this has no idea about American restaurant protocol. The "tip for good service" thing comes from the UK (perhaps elsewhere in Europe too, not sure since I don't know those cultures well). There (obviously it's changing as US cultural virus propagates) the idea was: default is no tip, a tip only exists as a token to denote thanks for something -- friendly service, quick service, and so on. Most service is slow and surly so -- no tips.

By contrast in the US the tip is mandatory. The server doesn't make any money and goes broke if you don't tip. So everyone does. Service would have to be astonishingly bad (waiter threw up on the customer?) to receive no tip. On the other end, one might give a somewhat higher tip if the server was particularly friendly, helpful, is related to you, is a friend of your kids, seems like they could use the money, and so on. There's no metric of "I was well served" that correlates to the tip.