Not so much, but 'round these parts, you wait to be seated and that sets the wheels in motion. Hostess takes drink orders, hands out menus, tells your waitperson you are there and what you want to drink. Waitperson brings your drink and takes your order. Later, brings your food, you eat, you pay, you leave.
If you didn’t go through the hostess I don’t know how you expected to be seated. Waitresses (and I was one for a little while) focus most of their attention on their assigned tables, so if you weren’t assigned to anyone then it’s not surprising that you didn’t get waited on. You should have contacted the hostess once you got there to make sure your table was assigned. Waitresses can’t take care of both their own tables and any rogue customers who come in and don’t follow the rules.
How did you get in the cafe anyway without going through the hostess? Did you jump the fence to the patio or something?
This is weird, because in a fair proportion of the places I’ve been, you sit down and the waitstaff comes up to you; there isn’t an individual server at the front of the restaurant to keep track of ingress and egress.
However, if this setup seems slow in working, I’d advise the OP to proactively signal for a server.
Wow, when that’s happened to me, after about five minutes I signal the nearest wait staff and ask, “Excuse me, is someone covering this table?” That usually gets results.
But I certainly wouldn’t sit there for half an hour of being ignored and never say a word.
I eat out alone for lunch a lot myself. This has only happened to me twice over the years, primarily because once it happens I never go back.
About ten or so years back I went to a nice little cafe that I visited infrequently. It was late afternoon and there was only one other table with customers. Shortly after I arrived they stood up and left, and didn’t look too happy. I didn’t particularly pay attention, because I had a newspaper and I knew service at this cafe was fairly lax at the best of times. After maybe five minutes a waiter places a glass of water and a menu on my table and scuttles off. About then I notice that every single employee of the place is huddled together and talking in hushed dramatic tones. Occasionally I overhear one or another seemingly overcome with emotion and their voices cracking. Some big dramatic to-do, I suppose. After about a half hour or so I’m tired of reading the paper and try to get someone’s attention. No go. They actively avoid looking at me and even move farther away.
Now, maybe it was a legitimate emergency. Maybe someone was threatening suicide or something. But if so, they should have closed the place and called the appropriate authorities. My guess is, all these years later, is that it was just some typical teenage bullshit, a mountain-of-a-molehill type of thing, with no responsible adult around and so the drama just grew and grew and grew.
So, like the other people before me, I stood up and left. I’m sure they were relieved, as they continued to actively avoid looking my way.
The other time is much less interesting. I visited a “Good Eats” restaurant (no relation to the TV show) on a Fathers Day right at noon. They were extremely busy with several very, very large tables of people. They sat me down and no one paid me the least bit of attention after that. After about ten minutes I figured they were simply too busy for my business and stood up and left.
Well, there’s your answer. You’re in Germany and you’re expecting service? Welcome to the “Dienstleistungswüste”.
I’m German, and I also have had to wait a long time for waitstaff to bring menus, to take orders, to bring the food, to bring the drinks, to bring the check. Unless you are at an expensive upscale restaurant expect lousy service anywhere in Germany. Have your waitstaff actually ever made the table tremble from the force they used to literally drop the plates in front of you? If not, you have never experienced real German hospitality!
I guess I just don’t get that mindset. Why provide the service at all if you don’t want to provide the service? There are plenty of low-end non-fast-food restaurants in the US that have you order at a counter, and you go pick up your order at the counter. That sort of set up doesn’t bother me at all, and I’d much rather go to that sort of restaurant than suffer at one with horrible wait service.
I was thinking the same thing.
In the hick part of Wisconsin your service is just as bad, and a waitress that wanted to watch television took 45 minutes to get us the bill, after we were done and asked for it. She just continued to watch her show and couldn’t total the order until her show was over. Had we been in around the home area, I might have walked out and waited for the cops to pay the bill off. I would have known to never go there though.
I’ve had the opposite happen - I’ll stand around like a dork trying to catch the attention of a waiter/waitress, only to be told to just sit anywhere. But I think that’s better than just sitting down and risk, um, what the OP described.
Which is what happened with that whole invasion of France thing awhile back. Seems the French restaurants had better service, the Reichstagg (sp?) was really hungry, and things just got confused after that.
