What’s the highest tip you have ever picked up off a table?
What are some of the strangest things people have left behind at the tables?
What are some of the most unusual requests customers have given, and were you able to fulfill them?
Also, please share your nastiest customer story (either your own or from what others have told you or the ones you witnessed).
Hey, this isn’t soup du jour! Last week, it was cream of chicken, and now it’s vegetable beef! I wanted soup du jour, so get it right!
More seriously - $2.13 an hour? I take it Florida is a “tip credits against minimum wage” state. Why not come to California, which isn’t a tip credit state, and better yet, to San Francisco, where minimum wage for everyone, including servers, is $8.50. And we still tip 15%
Contaminating food is obviously out, but how about molesting it? I believe it was Paula Poundstone who had a bit in her act about working as a waitress, and if a customer pissed her off, she’d touch their food. Oops, finger slides into the mashed potatos, smack their steak around a bit, etc. I’d like to think that’s taboo under the general ethics of serving food to humans, but I don’t know that for sure.
Sorry about the hijack, but this has been a curiosity of mine for many years.
I delivered pizzas for 3 years while a student at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1980’s. As you might expect, customers consisted of folks from many different backgrounds & ethnicities (white, black, Indian, Asian, etc.) Due to our close proximity to Avondale, I would estimate 30% of our clientele were black.
Most customers tipped between 0.50 and $1.00. Even “poor” college students usually tipped. During the three years I worked there, I never once received a tip from a black customer. Not even a penny. I know this sounds like an exaggeration, but I swear it is not.
Watching reruns of last summer’s show, it seems the No.1 complaint about Rocco’s was that the food was cold! In fact, the NYT restaurant critic called it “piping cold”. How could an experienced? restauranteur like Rocco (claims to be) have designed a kitchen that gets the food cold on the way to the table??
Just wondering! :smack:
Does being a waiter suck as much as I imagine it does?
Also, what if the waiter really fucks something up (brings things late, the incorrect orders, writes the reciept incorrectly), what’s the best way to complain so that I won’t have my food “modified” the next time I’m in?
Approximately 30 centimeters.
I’m a host, and sometimes I have to say “I’ll get a server right over to take care of that” to customers when they flag me down and ask me for something. There are some things I just can’t do- If they are ordering, I don’t have access to the order system, and it’s going to confuse the server if I’m adding stuff to their table. I’m not all that trained on the menu so I’m likely to screw up their order if I take it and tell it to their server. And if there is a problem (poorly cooked food etc.) I really don’t have the kind of authority to fix it that a server does. Plus, I am responsible for seating and cashing out every table in the restraunt, not just a few tables, so I really can’t lavish the attention on to a table that their server can. I’ve got a whole other job to do.
Of course if they ask for something I can do, I do it. The waiters tip me out and the more I help out the more they tip.
If you think your food isn’t being handled by bare hands, your living in a dream world. Waiters prepare a good amount of food (salads, soups, desserts, drinks, various other small things) and I have never seen a waiter don a glove. In fact, I only really see them wash their hands if they spill something sticky on themselves. Sometimes they use tongs- if they happen to be there and arn’t dirtier than thair hands are- but I wouldn’t count on it. Not to mention your plates…the rims of your glasses…everything ends up being touched by someone’s bare flesh.
I have no doubt my food is being handled by bare hands throughout its life between growing and being placed in front of me.
My personal opinion is that gloves are counter-productive in the quest for food safety as too many feel as if gloves are a magically, eternally sterile way to handle food. If anything, they encourage poor habits. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen fast food staff peel off their gloves, plop them on a ledge, work the register and put the gloves back on their now-dirty hands. Bleah. The three most important words in food safety are not “wear your gloves” but “wash your hands.” But that’s an entirely different thread.
What I was referring to was food being willfully manhandled by servers needing to non-verbally vent a bit of hostility. Paula’s bit was if a customer ticked her off, she’d take their pancakes (IIRC, she claimed to have worked at IHOP) and flip 'em back and forth in her hands a couple times.
Quality service includes:
Greeting within 45 seconds.
Suggesting a drink/informing of drink specials.
Suggesting an appetizer/informing of specials.
Drinks on table within 3 minutes.
Appetizers, if ordered, on table in 9 minutes, if not possible due to kitchen mistake/slowness, at least a check up.
Stop by to see if customer is ready to order 5 minutes after order of apps/declination of order of apps.
Check back on two bites/two minutes of receiving order.
Check back every 5-10 minutes(usually works out fine w/ laps you walk through your section), do not smother, but do not be unavailable.
Drink refills offered at half-full.
Dessert offered during last third of meal.
Check given after 2 bites of dessert/declination of dessert.
Change within 1 minute of payment method being displayed.
Any and all special requests fulfilled if possible.
No matter how weeded I get, I make sure 9/10’s of my tables get this level of attention.
I’m a very demanding customer because I’m also a very good server, I’m also a very rewarding customer.
Think of how often you have food in your mouth vs when you don’t. It’s not deliberate, it’s just how it is.
$80 on a $150 total, they loved me and were leaving town the next day for Cali after having me wait on them 5 of their 7 nights in town.
Sex toys. A box of them, apparently they were designers or consultants or something.
After seeing that we offered an Ahi tuna salad as well as macaroni and cheese(on the kid’s menu), a customer demanded(quite angrily!) to have a tuna salad sandwich with macaroni salad on the side. She just could not understand why we could not do this. Another fun thing is explaining to people that we don’t have just plain ol’ white bread.
I’ve got a depressing one that’s really short: $3 tip on a $250 tab, Europeans.
Why move to wait tables? I am a waiter as a job, not a career. Also, cost of living would no doubt destroy any wage gains.
I don’t manhandle food, I have witnessed a manager take someone’s coleslaw, dump it in a bowl, stir in 8 ounces of mayo(4oz portion of slaw) with her bare(clean) hands and then dump it back on a plate and send it back out with the server. The customer complained 4 times that the slaw was too dry and she did not want anything else, at all.
I used to deliver for/manage a Pizza Hut. One day, I was sent out on a run to a ghetto-as-hell apartment complex. I ring the doorbell, two ladies answered, both black. The total was 10.69, one of them gave me 10.75 and stood there and waited for me to make change as I fumbled around looking for 6 cents that I thought I’d never need. The other lady says “just let him keep it, as a tip” lady the first replies “I ain’t gots to tip, I’m black!” I give her a dime and leave.
I get back to the store and tell my manager the story, he’s black and hates ghetto black people(see: Chris Rock skit). He thinks it’s a funny story…then the phone rings. One of the women wants new wings because hers are allegedly raw. They go back and forth on it for a bit, with him finally replying “I don’t have to recook your wings, I’m BLACK!” and slamming the phone down. Truly priceless.
I think NBC did a fine job of showing why things at Roccos were the way they were…he’s a :wally .
It can, but it can also be very rewarding. If nothing else, it’s great to have season passes to the grim human carnival that occurs in restaurants daily.
Best way is to complain to a manager after you’ve already eaten, or by emailing or calling corporate. Once a manager is involved, (s)he’ll usually oversee the recooking and serving of your new food.
That’s what I always loved as a customer; there was one waitress who ALWAYS watched my drink for me. To eat, I need a drink, and vice versa generally. At restaurants I have learned to just ‘give up’ and keep eating, unless the food in spicey.
I’m also on medicaton with a side effect of dehydration, so that might do it. I’m always thirsty.
The only nagging thing I have about the occupation is this: once a friend and I went to Denny’s, and had the same waitress. We’d had her a few times before, and being the same age all around, talked a bit. She let it slip one night that she was supposed to leave twenty minutes ago :eek: … we were horrified, but apparently it is quite common that if a table comes in five minutes before you leave, you have to stay until they leave? (She was waiting on another table, at least, but we still didn’t stay long at all after she said that, and always asked our waiter/waitress when they were supposed to get off after that night.)
/Shadez
PS, if you need to rant about customers, Dan Turk, there is a lovejournal community here
I drink two gallons of water a day due to my diet, so I know the thirst thing well.
Yes, you stay as long as your tables stay unless 1)mgmt will let you transfer them and 2) someone wants to pickup the transfer. If you were regulars as you say, she may not have wanted to give away a good tip like that, and chosen to not transfer you guys and instead wait it out. I do this often with regulars, the extra hour is worth 10 bucks to me while I stay and get my sidework done anyway. Her restaurant may vary, of course.
Re: black people not tipping…
I was told by a black server coworker once that it’s just not part of the culture. Like senior citizens who leave tips that jingle, in spite of the fact that in this day and age a good tip should never consist of less than a buck. It’s Just The Way Things Are.
If anybody else has a legit answer, I’d love to hear it, because in my eight years of “hospitality,” the number of black people who’ve tipped more than 10% are almost countable on my fingers. By that I mean that I can remember them vividly because they were so rare. Even other black servers don’t want to wait on them; they know it too. It’s one of the Dirty Secrets of working in a tipped industry, and nobody I know has a real answer because it’s just not the type of question you can ask. “Hi, I know I just gave you fabulous service and you tipped me $4 on $65, and that’s fine and I’ll get over it, but can you just tell me WHY?”
Another ugly truth is that teachers don’t tip, either. I bartend downtown here in San Antonio, and we get at least one teachers’ convention a year, and we all dread it because you run your ass off and go broke. The only teacher I ever met who was a good tipper was one of my coworkers, who taught elementary during the day and waited tables at night for extra cash. She didn’t have any explanations, either. She was just so embarrassed by her coworkers that she refused to go out with them.
The after-church crowd is pretty horrendous too…mainly because there are SO MANY of them, so they can literally overtake your whole section for the entire lunch rush, so there’s nobody to offset your losses like there usually is when you get crappy tippers.
Thank God I don’t work day shifts anymore.
Other than that there are really no rules as to who tips and who doesn’t…and even these rules can be broken, so any decent server/bartender will never compromise their service and their tip by guessing.
But I really wish somebody could explain it to me.
Question from an ignorant European. Do waiters in the States introduce themselves? As in “Hi, I’m Dan Turk, your waiter for tonight.” Or is that a mistaken idea we Europeans have?
Also, does it bother you if someone orders the cheapest item on the menu (possibly a starter) and tap water? I always feel uncomfortable doing that, even if it’s sincerely what I would like to have and it’s not about saving money. My friend always says that if they offer it on the meny they should be happy to serve it, which I can see the point of as well. Any thoughts?