Yeah, this doesn’t quite make sense to me, as an Americano is espresso and water, and you’re asking for soy. I’m guessing you’re looking for something closer to, say, a soy flat white with vanilla syrup and extra room for creamer? I’d certainly ask you to clarify if I were your barista. (I am not a barista, but I know a reasonable amount about coffee.) This is the one area where I would generally check to be very sure about what I was ordering, as the ratios of coffee to water and/or milk/cream/half-n-half/dairy substitute mean pretty distinct differences in taste.
I used to work in a Quizno’s on a college campus; the only people who annoyed me were the folks who wanted the roast beef sandwiches run through 2-3 times because their beef had to be “extra well done”. When there’s a line out the door and we’re going at 20-50 seconds per sandwich, it’s annoying to have to do the extra babying of one customer’s sandwich. However, just about anything else was no big deal; we all made our own FrankenQuizno’s subs on a regular basis, so it was pretty normal for us to do special orders with add-ons or exceptions. My favorite was a veggie with bacon-- it’s sacrilicious!
The one that annoys me as a customer is when my dining companions order off-menu or make so many substitutions as to be ordering off-menu. Either go to a restaurant that cooks food that is more to your liking, or find something that’s really close to what you want and make a couple of substitutions. I can’t imagine cooks want to deal with someone ordering what was a chicken Caesar salad but is now a Cobb salad with croutons, olives and chicken instead of ham or bacon.
(My MIL will frequently order one particular dish, or at least attempt to, at just about every place-- even the ones where it’s fairly obvious they will not have the necessary seasonings to make it work.)
It doesn’t seem to work quite that way at my 2 local McDonald’s. No one wipes off the salt, and a fresh batch is always coming out of the deep fryer in seconds, so they just dump it in the tray, scoop up a portion for (low-salt) me, then salt the remainder the usual, excessive way. It holds up nothing at all.
If they didn’t pour so much salt on the food, they wouldn’t have the problem in the first place. Not everything is improved with copious salt, but many people are shy about asking for less. Not me.
Although McDonald’s fries haven’t been very tasty since they discontinued beef tallow, so I rarely order them anyway.
Although not explicitly stated, the obvious impossibility of acquiescing to his demands without buggering up the inventory or the float was perfectly clear to me, even as someone who has never stood behind the counter at McD’s. This is largely why it was so attractive to imagine him as cat food.
When I worked at Pizza Hut, more than 20 years ago, we didn’t care what people ordered. What we cared about was the stupid crap they kept adding to the menu that we had to deal with and get customer complaints from. For example at that that time they introduced a brand new flat, rectangle pizza… Trouble was, it was larger than our Large pizza and we had to use the same toppings. So some pieces of that pizza didn’t even get toppings, and this got complaints.
I’ve given up on my special order. I used to try to get my burger with mustard and onion only, which would give the cashier fits. No matter how I said it, they rarely understood what I wanted. And this is at several different fast food places, both drive-through and face-to-face. It would just always trip them up. I came to assume that special orders were a fast food worker’s hell.
Now I don’t even bother. I just order whatever as it is, and scrape off/add what I want.
The reason I get my drink the way I do is because I don’t care too much for the taste. I like my drinks sweet, that’s why I add the vanilla, and I love the kick I get from the espresso and the soy masks the bitterness. Milk screws with my stomach.
So I could get a soy caramel latte w/vanilla at Starbucks. That’ll run almost $5. If I get an Americano with vanilla and I put soy and sugar, it tastes perfect for me and is about half the price.
Just today, I had a burrito for supper, at a place where they put on all the toppings as you watch (so basically, everything is a special order). I ordered my usual “everything except guacamole, lettuce, and medium”, and still had to remind the burritista “no lettuce” when she reached for it.
If someone ordered a double-shot soy americano with two pumps of vanilla and room and walked away so I couldn’t clarify, I would probably dump an inch of soy in the bottom of the cup and then make an americano. When people have done that sort of thing in the past, I usually just hand them the soy and the empty cup and then make the drink with whatever room they leave me. It costs 50 cents to add soy where I work regardless of the amount so I like to let people be in control of that stuff since having to remake a soy drink is a pain the ass.
I don’t think it’s shyness so much as a basic understanding that a fast-food restaurant is not a short-order diner where your food is all made specially to order. It’s fast food fries. If you don’t like them, you don’t like them. Order something else. Or go to a real restaurant.
And at any rate, most people like the super-salty fries, or McD’s wouldn’t make them that way. A lot of people request extra salt packets so they can add more, actually.
I’ve had to stop going to my favorite fast food chain (Spain only), because so much of their current menu involves mustard, which I can’t have. I asked whether it was possible to get any of those with a different sauce and apparently it’s not
It doesn’t quite make sense from the point of view of “what’s involved in making one of those sandwiches”, but I guess the SKU is the SKU is the SKU…
Oh dear Og yes! I’ve griped about this for years. I just don’t understand the mentality. If you want to buy a new Ford truck, you don’t go to the Dodge dealer and demand a new Ford truck. You don’t go to an auto parts store to buy office supplies. Heck, you don’t go to Pizza Hut when you want a steak dinner. But people cheerfully go into a “generic American restaurant” and try to get things from some other restaurant’s menu (usually, I figure this is because the other restaurant is more expensive and they’re trying to get the same thing for less).
Some of the worst offenders are actually senior citizens trying to save money. Somebody upthread mentioned a kid figuring out it was cheaper to order fries + extra cheese than to order the “cheese fries”. Some seniors will try the same thing - pick out the more expensive dish they want, then figure out which cheaper item might be somewhat close and start substituting like crazy in an attempt to turn that cheaper dish into the more expensive one.
I wish that people attending conventions would understand this (I’m currently a convention/banquet cook). The kitchen in a convention facility is not set up like a restaurant kitchen. It’s designed for preparing mass quantities of identical dishes, not for plating individual meals. We do our best to accommodate special diets, like vegetarians, and the most common food restrictions like gluten-free, dairy-free, and allergies. But we simply cannot keep every imaginable ingredient on-hand to cater to every possible dietary restriction, and it comes to a point where if you can’t eat something, then just don’t eat that part of the meal that’s being served, or if you’re genuinely allergic we’ll simply leave it off your plate. We’re a convention facility, not a hospital.
Okay, this makes much more sense to me. With the initial explanation, I was going “Is it the coffee or the water that’s supposed to be made out of soy?” in reaction. Now that I know you want an Americano, sweetened with syrup and with room at the top for soy milk, it all makes sense. Your post also makes me feel very lucky that 1) I can drink cow’s milk and 2) I have gotten used to the taste of coffee without a ton of sweetener. I still need some sort of “cream”, whether it be from a cow or an almond.
Now I need a new apron. Who could resist that sweet piggy face?
This is not the case with MIL. She’s sweet and means well, but she’s on a “there’s a list of things that I will eat” diet that she thinks is going to keep her thin so that she can live forever. Add to this her small experience with ways to cook one of the ingredients, and almost all menus are apt to be redesigned, as it’s a popular protein option, but not always offered cooked in the manner she likes best.
I worked at an extremely busy McDonald’s for four years 15 years ago. The only special order that ever annoyed me was the guy who wanted his Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit disassembled: the biscuit alone in the wrapper, and the bacon, egg, and cheese each in its own little box. One sandwich, four quarantined ingredients.
Everything else was a piece of cake. Employees themselves often made special requests when they ate company food on their breaks, and usually pretty creative ones at that, so the majority of customer special requests were really easily accommodated.
Or a taco from Taco Bell that actually has ingredients like the picture, and not the one you get with 1/8 teaspoon of meat, 3 cheese shreds and a little lettuce.
As someone who doesn’t eat meat, but eats out (including fast-food) fairly regularly, I have found it is more a matter of how you ask for a special request that the actual specifics of the request itself.
“Pardon me Miss,” (or if it’s a 20-something slacker kid taking the order, “Hey Man”) “I don’t eat meat, so can I please get the chili relleno platter with the veggie black beans instead of the regular refried?” is almost always answered with a quick “Sure, no problem!”
People who tend to pontificate to the waitstaff for 15 minutes about the minutiae of their special order, like how they are a practicing member of a sect who’s chief tenet is that turkey broth is a demonic sacrament or how a tiny speck of pepper is sure to cause them instant death are probably less likely to get a positive response.
You’re supposed to order two McDoubles with Big Mac sauce and without ketchup or mustard. Then you end up with a larger quantity of food for about the same price. Take a tip from this article.
Back in my days at McDonald’s, they wouldn’t let us do something like that. You could subtract something or make it with extra something but you couldn’t put something on that wouldn’t ordinarily be on there. I remember one customer throwing a tantrum because we wouldn’t add ketchup to his Big Mac but instead offered him ketchup packets so he could add it himself.
