And Oxymoron of the Thread goes to…
I don’t like Applebees, I meant “it’s the same type of place - food selection and price - as Applebees.” And I really don’t like Kriegers that much either, it’s never somewhere I’ve deliberately chosen to eat at.
I believe Vinyl Turnip is misremembering. AIUI, Carol Stream has self-identified as female.
Not a lot of time for (or interest in) digging up that post, but if there is sufficient clamor, I’ll try to accommodate.
Well color me surprised–given how her rants have a tone of a disgruntled unemployed middle aged man eating chili in his wifebeater tshirts watching tv while he kicks the dog and complains about the ferriners attitude-I hate to have to admit you are correct.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7998749&postcount=127
Here I have been holding out hope that women were too smart to be this stupid or to admit it. But I see I was incorrect.
And a place like that is completely run off their computers - their computers make up for the fact that the restaurant is understaffed and when its your second day, its your second day waiting tables EVER. The kitchen staff doesn’t necessarily know how to make a salad without the computer telling them “its time to make a salad now - put some lettuce in a bowl.” When the computers ARE working, service can be uneven and your food can arrive cold.
Surprisingly, it doesn’t matter how inept the service is or that the food is at best “serviceable,” the places like this around me are consistently packed for their cheap food and cheap happy hour - at least until another place with cheap food, bad service and 2 for 1 pitchers opens and becomes more popular and the lemmings move.
I got carried away, and will make no excuses. Sorry Q.E.D. and fluiddruid
Why the fixation on my username by some of you? I don’t get that, myself.
Maybe people want to know what is the proper pronoun to call you, so they don’t risk unnecessarily offending you? Or else they’re wondering if your name isn’t a proper human name, but instead refers to a place, in which case they still wouldn’t know what pronoun to use? Since some people on this Board like to deliberately use the wrong pronoun to insult others, efforts to try to find the proper one should be encouraged.
You know, I don’t remember a time when a polite “Excuse me, ma’am? Sorry, yes, I’d ordered a salad” or “I don’t mean to be a bother, but this coffee is very watery. Would you mind making it again, please?” or “I’m sorry, I thought I should let you know that there’s a bad smell in the men’s washroom” failed to produce results. Hell, I’ve gotten meals comped before by making polite complaints about service/foreign objects in the food/etc. I’ve never understood the need to lose one’s shit.
Actually, I can sort of understand someone who genuinely loses his or her shit – maybe they’re having a bad day or whatever – though I often have bad days and I can usually keep it out of the waitstaff’s faces. What I really don’t get is the people who throw calculated hissy-fits because they think it will somehow get a faster or better response. It won’t, and it’ll just ruin the evening for everyone else.
That was big of you; no sarcasm there. Apology accepted.
Danger lurks in restaurants when a customer chews out a waitress. You should hire a food taster after doing that.
Some people chew out waiters because they can. It makes them feel superior. It fixes nothing.
If it is too bad, call the manager quietly. He wants you back and will try to solve the problem. If you are an asshole the service staff is happy to see you gone.
Just last night I was at a medium priced restaurant in a smallish city in Alabama. They were fully licensed and had a bar, and have been open for around half a year. I stopped in because my last trip through I noticed them and I wanted to give the new guys a try, and I avoid the chains whenever possible.
Time for the drink order. They don’t have Glenfiddich, they don’t have Glenlivet, it turns out they have no single malt at all. All right, they do have Dewar’s, and I order some neat. If the waiter didn’t know what that meant he should have asked, and if he didn’t know the bartender should have, but I got scotch on the rocks.
If I’d wanted a scotch slushy I’d have ordered one, but I politely say that this was supposed to be no ice, and he toddles off to return with a glass of ice cold diluted scotch. They had simply strained out the ice and sent it back. If you’re not a scotch drinker you might not know this, but if they sent you a drink with a turd in it and thought that by fishing it out you’d be satisfied you’d have an idea of what it was like.
I ended up keeping it, because I didn’t want to be “that guy”, but I won’t be back, and because I didn’t complain they’ll never know why. I probably should have found someone to talk to about it, but I have enough going on without having to do quality control checks on their restaurant.
I hate to send something back at all, and have only sent something back twice once in my life. I ordered a martini, and the first one was a gimlet, and the second one was made with sweet vermouth instead of dry vermouth. I was embarrassed for the poor waiter I had to send back with the drink, but what was I supposed to do?
You don’t have to be a scotch drinker to recognize that, if you order a drink without ice, it’s because you don’t want it to be ice-cold. Not knowing what you meant by “neat” was incompetent, but straining the ice out and sending you back the same scotch was stupid. In this case, you should have been “that guy.”
Sort of related to the OP:
It’s really sad when ordinary patience gets lauded by the employee. I went to Moe’s for dinner this evening. There was a line, but not much of one-- a couple people who didn’t know what they wanted, and several people who were watching their food being assembled. The guy assembling the burrito for the person in front of me failed. So he came back in front of me, apologized for the delay, grabbed a fresh tortilla, rewrapped the failed burrito and came back to me. He then thanked me for waiting patiently.
Um, hello? I waited like 30 seconds or so. Not a huge amount of time, especially since I’d been acknowledged. I only get huffy when I start feeling invisible. Or when I’m running late–and I was aware of the potential to have to stand in line much longer than I had to.
So I smiled and said “no problem” and moved on down the line.
My father’s drink was a perfect Rob Roy, with a lemon twist, straight up. For those who aren’t familiar with this drink, it’s a scotch manhattan (which is whiskey and sweet vermouth) with half the sweet vermouth replaced with dry vermouth.
This was screwed up almost anywhere he went. Most often he’d get it on the rocks (at which point they’d usually strain out the ice an hand it back, and he’d sigh and go with it), but a fair number of places had no idea how to make this drink. He’d get all sorts of interesting variations.
One time at Applebee’s (where else?), he ordered his drink, which came wrong. So he sent it back, and got another wrong one. He tried to explain to the waitress exactly how it was supposed to be made, which didn’t help. At this point they were leaving the drinks on the table as they continued to try to get it right. Eventually the manager came over, my father explained everything again, and the manager decided that he would try it. Still wrong. So finally, he brought over a glass of scotch, a glass of sweet vermouth, a glass of dry vermouth and told my father, “you make it.” By this time my father had about three incorrectly made Rob Roys, plus three separate glasses of liquor.
It was far too funny to get mad about.
Just out of curiosity, is the term “neat” used for liquor other than scotch? Because I’ve yet to encounter a bartender in my town who knows what I mean when I say “neat”. They all understand “straight” just fine. (Caveat: the number of places I’ve ordered scotch around here is fairly limited. There may be bartenders I haven’t met who know what “neat” means.)
Heh. Reminds me of the time I was driving by some road construction with a cop monitoring the traffic. A pedestrian was picking her way along the edge of the available roadway, right near the cop. I slowed down and crawled past her, then past the cop – who mouthed a huge “Thank you!” at me.
Now, I ask you – what kind of assholish drivers who’d mow down a pedestrian right in front of a cop must this officer have been exposed to in his career, that he’d –
checks location
Um, never mind.
I don’t use the term “straight up” because that’s the way I have my martinis. shaken with ice and strained into a glass. I’d hate to get my scotch that way. If the customer uses a term you don’t understand you should check with them.
Professional bartenders are invaluable to a restaurant. I’ve been served martinis by bartenders that thought “extra dry” meant they should use a lot of vermouth. It says extra dry on the label, doesn’t it?