A couple of restaurant pet peeves

[continuing Barbie’s hijack and rant]

At least with Barbie, people know you’re female. Try having a name like Kinsey. People hear the just the name, and assume it must be a guy. Why?
Sound female to me…well, I guess since it’s MY name, I know better, but still…

[/ending Barbie’s hijack and rant]

Damn you, Kinsey. You’re a really mean guy.

And monster, I wasn’t picking on you in particular. I was more ranting at the world in general. Seems like a good day for it.

Cervaise: There are Red Robin’s in Pennsylvania too…although fairly recently.

AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
:wink:

It is not always the service, or the kids.

We went to a diner named “Johnnie’s Broiler” for the first time the other night. (Apparently it is going to appear in an X-Files episode as a bus station…)

Anyway, we had just sat down at our table when we heard someone about 2-3 booths over complaining and cursing loudly about how cold his eggs were. The waitress had just come over to us when he yelled something and threw his plate on the floor.

I was doing my best to ignore the whole thing, but it upset my SO so much that we left the place. We aren’t judging the restaurant by that one customer, but it will probably be a while before we go back.

There’s one cardinal rule about upsetting the wait staff that has yet to be mentioned: Don’t do it until AFTER you’re done eating. Piss off your server in the middle of your meal, and there’s no telling what might be in the secret sauce of the next course.

I’m sure it doesn’t happen very often, but I KNOW it happens…and not because I’ve done it.

Hey Dan, although credit card tips are easily enuff traced as been run through and taken, what is to say that when the manager takes that little slip and puts it in the drawer, that he actually gives the leftover tip to the server.
Your statement is going to show that you paid it, and the resturant is going to show that the bill was paid and the tip taken out and accounted for compared to the cash they have left, but between the register and the waitress it can get lost.
Very easy to do. Sometimes it happens on accident and sometimes not.
When someone pays with a card you put the slip in the drawer and then hand out the cash. At the end of the nite when you do your book work you total all cards including tip and minus that from the cash to balance things out. That money is then accounted for wether it made it to the server or not.
Some places give the server a print out of sales and credit tips, that you collect at the end of the nite. This saves alot of hassle over money when you and the manager both have to sign the slip before money is handed out.

Highchair saftey tip 101: Never let your sever put you at a booth with a highchair on the end. To easily tripped over, and it puts the child at risk. I have gotten in many arguments with parents who say a booth would be fine with the child at the end. I just let them know that first it is againt policy, and second, I wouldn’t do that to one of my own five children what makes you think I would do it to yours.

kricket: assuming the restaurant has a accountant, and does double entry bookeeping, it would show up in a hot second. One of those “family-run” places, where the manager is the bookeeper, and the owner (or his wife is), then they might be able to get away with it. Most good restaurants have their waitstaff take the reciept & $$ back & forth, so you would KNOW. But if you thought your manager was stealing from you, the proper think to do is NOT tell the custoamer, ferkrisake, but various agencies. They can catch him in a hot second.

Oh, and bunnie has a few details wrong with her tax on tips thing, but as this is MPSIMS, and not GQ, I have not pointed them out. I’m a certified Enrolled Agent you see…

Hmmm, Daniel, I am quite curious. Do elaborate.

This is going to be long. I apologize in advance.

Hi Kinsey,

Here’s the story. Rackensack ticked me off badly enough that I’m going to tell it more “as is” than the “cute” version that I normally tell.
Setting the scene, I’m fully grown. 6’7" 255#. Broad shouldered, not fat, though at 44 years of age my waistline is now about the same as my chest measurement. I’ve never been in a fight in my entire adult life. Back out one clown that insisted on “having a piece of me” in my college days and the last fight that I was in goes back to elementary school. (Even that wasn’t my doing.) The point here is that my size hasn’t given me license to be a bully.

My wife and I were doing some remodelling. We stopped and picked out some wallpaper at lunch, and proceeded on to a family restuarant name “Po Folks”. For those of you unfamiliar with particular establishment, they serve southern style home cookin. Everything on the menu is simple enough that you could fix it at home, were you so inclined. It caters to the working stiff and his/her family.

The hostess greeted us with the obligatory “smoking or non-smoking”. We asked for non-smoking. She replied that “they would have to bus some tables”.

Well, I could see into the smoking area (the left half of the restaurant) and there were people at only two tables. I volunteered that since smoking was nearly empty that would be fine.

It turned out that they also needed to bus tables in the smoking section. We waited a short while while they prepared us a booth that was equidistant from the two occupied tables. Once seated, we placed our order and began chatting about wallpaper.

Enter the problem.

Before we’d even gotten our food another party came in and asked to be seated in the smoking section. With an entire restaurant (less 3 tables) at their disposal the restaurant staff chose to bus the booth immediately behind me. 6 people took residency. It appeared to be a couple in their mid 20s, the woman’s mother, and three kids. The two older kids were about 5 and 6, the youngest was still high-chair aged.

Now the two older kids were amazing. They didn’t wiggle, they didn’t laugh, they didn’t climb around. Had I not seen them enter I’d have not known they were there. And they were seated with their backs to mine.

The youngest was a completely different matter. He was loud. He was noisy. He was fussy. He was messy. In short – he was completely out of control.

As we ate an otherwise OK meal, I noticed that the ONLY sounds that I was hearing from the booth was the brat (nonstop), and an occasional comment from daddy – usually directed at mom and in a “my way” kind of voice. I felt sorry for her.

My wife and I decided that it was pointless to sit through any more of this than we had to, so with our meals about half eaten we chose to expedite matters and get our check so that we could leave whenever we were ready. When the waitress next came by and asked if we needed anything I said, “The check please”, and with a slight nod toward the table behind me added, “and some duct tape”.

The waitress appreciated the humor. She’d been watching the scene behind us as well and with my comment, she let out a big knowing smile, nodded in appreciation of an understanding customer, and went to get our check.

Within a minute, the guy gets up, comes over to our booth, puts one hand on the table in front of me, fingers under the edge of my plate, his other hand behind me on the back of the bench, and with his nicotine stained breath starts giving me absolute hell about my duct tape comment. Keep in mind that from the time that they sat down, I’d not once looked back at them. I’d made no comment to them or about them to my wife. I’d done nothing to provoke this character. My “duct tape” comment to the waitress was a semi-private comment, said with a smile and in a soft voice. My conversation with my waitress is none of his damned business.

I’m familiar with “small man’s disease”. Take a guy that’s 5’6, 140# and he feels inferior. Life cheated him by not giving him a linebacker’s physique. And this guy fit the mold perfectly. I let him rant for a couple of sentences, agreeing with him enough to let him cool down, but it wasn’t enough. He kept going. Only when I (figuratively) stood up to the guy and suggested that maybe it was dad that needed the duct tape did he back down and sit down.

Well, Terri and I continued to eat. But the longer we sat there the more it gnawed at me. The guy had shown his ass, embarrassing his wife and mother-in-law, and pissing me off. The longer we sat there, the more it got to me until I finally looked at my wife and said, “I’ve had enough – are you ready to go?” She replied, “Yeah, let’s go”.

As I stood up I looked back at the booth behind me and was completely shocked to see that the “kid” had absolutely destroyed a coloring book. There were whole pages strewn around the floor (none of them colored). Food on the kid, table, benches and floor that had to cover 100 sq/ft. It was a disaster area.

In a completely uncharacteristic move, I decided that the little bastard (daddy) wasn’t getting off that easily. I reached down, picked up a handful of paper, food, and whatever other mystery objects the kid had strewn and set them on the edge of the table, making damned sure that the edges of the paper wandered onto daddy’s plate, and said, “excuse me, but you seem to have dropped this.”

As one might expect, the guy came unglued. Once I’d gotten around another table and halfway to the exit he jumps out of his chair and proceeds with the “I’ll show you” show. He yells, cusses, threatens. Once again embarrassing the family and making sure that everyone in the entire restaurant knew that he was “the boss”. I stopped, turned towards him, and surveyed the restaurant for what was behind him as it was where we were going to land if he lays a finger on me. (At twice his size and weight I’d never think of getting into a fist fight with him. My instinct was that that if things progressed that far he was getting broadsided with my full weight. The only question mark was where we were going to land.)

He stopped dead in his tracks once my back was no longer turned to him. He did continue to rant and rave, but no longer displayed a physical threat. So I turned, trying to walk away from the whole thing, and went to the cashier to settle up.

Once my back was to him, I again became the subject of his increased tirade and attempted physical intimidation. I’m standing at the cashier’s, paying the bill, and this clown is standing in the doorway continuing his verbal assault.

Bottom line is, it ended without bloodshed or anything more than some noise. But were my temperament a bit different, I’d have done the world a favor and removed him from the gene pool.
Now, Rackensack. It’s your turn in the barrel.

You got off to such a good start when you described your attempts to raise your kids to be understanding of public settings. I almost fell for your, “I’m a good parent that tries his hardest” line.

The somewhat condescending attitude not withstanding, I had given you the benefit of the doubt up to that point. Then you plunge your credibility into the toilet as you chastise me for what is obviously my “intolerant attitude”.

This guy was looking for a fight. He wanted to demonstrate that everything within his view was his domain. I was just unlucky enough to be the guy on whom he chose to unload.

Could I have handled it differently? Of course. But it wouldn’t have changed much. He wanted to rant. I didn’t want to take it. The only thing that I could have done differently is to not make an off-hand comment to the waitress that I didn’t blame her for the events behind me.

And now I find that your intolerance ranks you pretty far up on the “I pay for my meal too, so fuck you if you don’t like the baggage I bring”-o-meter. Jumping on me before knowing the story suggests that you, too, are an attitude problem.

My posts didn’t ask that children be locked up until they’re 18 years old. Though attitudes like yours might make a good argument for it.

What I was asking for, is simple consideration and some common courtesy.

What a lousy experience, SouthernStyle.

I have to insert a nitpick, though. From your story, what restaurants need is a no a**hole section, not a no children section. It sounds to me like that guy would have been almost as irritating without the loud baby.

The main reason I bring this up is that we once had a remarkably similar experience in a restaurant with no children in sight. I won’t go into the details, but it involved a very expensive dinner and a couple of really foul cigars.

Dan, if you want to believe it or not it still happens even in non-family type places.
I agree that the server should not ask for a guest not to leave a credit tip, that is rude.
That is not the point I am trying to argue. I am just letting you know that it does happen.
It ends up in a he said she said type of deal with the server losing out.
Manager said he gave her the tip, server says it was never gotten. The book work, all of it, says it was taken out of the drawer. So where did it go and who do you trust? That is why it is a good idea to have manager and server sign a slip saying the X amount was given and recieved from credit card tips.
And yes, credit card tips are the first taxed. They show up on your servers end of the day report. It’s the cash tips that slip thru the system. I don’t remember who brought that up but I thought I would address that while I was here.

The story about the family from hell is classic. You get them all the time and it is sad for the people who have to sit next to them. I have actually asked other tables if they would like to sit somewhere not so close to them. Even though it isn’t right for someone to have to move away from the problem table it shows them that I am aware of the problem and trying to come up with a solution. I have also had to ask people to leave who were being loud and disruptive. I used to work a late bar rush you see.

Hi Southern Style,
Wow, what a jerk. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that guy was my ex-husband. He had the same problem, a Napoleon complex. He was about 5’6" and scrawny. He liked to say he was 5’9", but I’m 5’4" and he was only about 2 inches taller than me.
Anyway, he was always trying to pick fights with guys twice his size, to prove what a “man” he was.

You were the better person for not pounding him into meatloaf.
As Cher4 said, they need a No-A**hole section. Someone mentioned the guy throwing his plate on the floor. He needs to be in that section, too.
Jeez.

Oops!
Should have been Cher3…I wrote Cher4.
Sorry for messing up your name.
What a dope.
:smiley:

I’m devastated, Kinsey.

Why I’m nothing like a cher4! You wouldn’t call him WallyM8, would you?

I ate at an O’Charley’s last week. the restuarant was new, so I figured I could give the water a break. I arrived with a small group (about 6 people). We were seated quickly, fortunately not in the same section as the screaming 4 year old. The drinks were served piecemeal, and the orders were taken long after that. I ordered a salad, others order full meals. The waiter brought appetizers and bread, came back and said our food should be out momentarily, the kitchen was putting the finishing touches on. 15 minutes later he comes back and gives us the same line. I ask him if I can please have my salad, I’m late for an appointment. He says he can’t bring it out until the rest of the entrees are brought out. Finally I demand my salad be brought. The salad and the manager show up. I explain we’ve waited nearly an hour to get our food, and the section wasn’t even very busy. I eat a couple bites of my food, then ask the waiter for a styrofoam box so I can take it and eat it after my appointment (My horse had a shoe off for several weeks and the farrier was just getting there to shoe him). I took my salad and gave a $20 to the person sitting next to me asking her to pay my bill and leave a tip and bring my change to work. The next day she gave me $16 back and said the manager didn’t charge me for my salad, just my drink. And they tipped the waiter $2.00, the same as my drink cost.

SouthernStyle:
I think we’ve seen each other around some of the other “child-reiented” threads (if you get my drift), and I much say that however much I dislike being forced out of somewhere because of the rudeness of others, the one sure way to get away from having to deal with screaming, messy little monsters who aren’t disciplined is to go to different restaurants. No more Denny’s, or Chili’s or Bennigan’s. If you look, you can often find places with distinctly “no kids” atmosphere that aren’t any more expensive. When we eat out (and normally I don’t eat at restaurants that don’t cook better than I can) at our normal places (Stella Trattoria and The Fourth Story, for any Denverites who care), I can’t say I’ve ever seen a kid in there. And my dining experience has been much the better for it.

OT, maybe some of these parents can tell me why they bring their five- and six-year-old children out to a sushi bar. They don’t like the food, they get bored and obnoxious, so why even attempt to bring them? Babysitters are a Good Thing.

Above, it should be child related threads. I can’t even figure out what kind of train wreck caused me to mistype as I did. :slight_smile:

As you know, I’m a parent and my response to your question is: I have no idea. I’ve seen kids in totally inappropriate restaurants, too, and I really don’t understand it. Another thing that amazes me is how little regard some parents have for their children’s sleep schedules. What the heck are you doing in here having dinner at 9:00 with a baby?

However, one of our favorite family places is a sushi bar/restaurant. I don’t want my kids to grow up unable to eat anything but chicken fingers and fries. My three-year-old loves miso soup and edamame and salmon teriyaki. I keep the sushi for myself.

Slight hijack…
On the topic of kids in inappropriate restaurants, how about when you are at the 9:00 pm (or later) showing of an R-rated movie and people walk in with a kid who shouldn’t be there?
I have seen young (under 12 or so) kids at movies like any of the Lethal Weapon movies, saw a kid no more than 7 or 8 at “Interview with the Vampire”, young girls (under 10) at “Titanic” (ok, they were there to see Leo, but it was rated PG-13), saw a kid about 5 at “Analyze This”…
I could go on and on. It’s amazing what people will take their kids to see.

Big hijack…
I apologize in advance to anyone with a number in their name if I try and quote you or agree with you, and accidentally get your name or number wrong.
Sorry again, Cher3!

Now back to the original topic…