I really don’t like it when the waiter/waitress takes my glass away to refill it.
[ul]
[li]I don’t want anyone else touching my drinking glass. When they take it away, I can’t see who handles the glass or where it goes.[/li][li]Sometimes the waitperson picks up identical glasses with identical beverages from multiple people at the table. We have only our faith in the waitperson’s competence to assure us that we got our own glass back.[/li][li]Sometimes the glass is gone for quite a while, leaving me without even ice as a beverage.[/li][/ul]
Doesn’t bug me much. The waitperson handled the glass on its way to me the first time, no?
Bugs me marginally more than item 1, but still not much.
Bugs me a lot. This is just incompetence on the waitperson’s part. Once you’ve requested a drink refill, whether they take the glass away or not, you should get your refilled drink relatively quickly, instead of having to sit there waiting for it.
I don’t think I’ve ever had my drink refilled in the manner described by the OP. I would find that highly disturbing.
Usually I order water, wine, ice tea or beer when dining out. The water and ice tea are refilled at my table from a pitcher, the bottle of wine, of course, is at my table and the beer either, a) comes in a bottle or b) if on tap, is brought to me in a new glass, assuming I’m ordering more than one.
This thought occurred to me while eating at a Chinese buffet where I often meet some friends for lunch. I watched carefully as the waiter took our glasses to the soda machine and refilled them (we were all drinking ice water) and then brought them back and set them in front of us with no concern for which glass went where.
This is why I now order ice water with 2 slices of lemon, please.
Ummm…you can’t see your glass or where it goes before you get your beverage, either.
And trust me, you are taking a lot more faith in your waitperson than your glass.
Eating in a restraunt- even a good one- requires a lot of suspension of belief regarding what goes on in the kitchen. Restraunts are scrummy, dirty, germy places. The bad news is, so is the rest of the world- even your own home. Despite what the ads for anti-bacterial soap would have you believe, there is no way to avoid germs and you will occasionally get sick from them. I’d only worry about it if I had an autoimmune illness or something. Otherwise, relax and be thankful that you live in the developed world where stuff like clean water is availible.
My OP was provoked by an incident at lunch today. I was eating late, so the place was not busy. I prefer water, but I ordered iced tea because they are usually better about refilling paid drinks than water. I have a dry throat and need something to wash my food down. The waitress never came to refill my iced tea. Eventually, she came with the bill, and I asked for a carry-out box and a refill. She grabbed my full plate to take away, and I stopped her, reminding her that I’d asked for a box (at this place they always bring the box to the table). She gave me a dirty look, then took my glass away. I was a little peeved at her attitude, so I told her that I preferred it if my glass wasn’t taken from the table. She went and got the manager, and they both stood there and looked at me like I was crazy while I explained that I thought customers preferred to have their drinks refilled at the table. I made it clear that I was not blaming the waitress, but merely making a suggestion.
Both the manager and the waitress were hostile and sullen about the matter. I won’t be going back. But I thought I should check around to find out if I was being unreasonable.
From now on, if a waitperson tries to take my drink, I’ll ask for a new glass.
I’m not sure the waitress could have refilled the drink at the table. A lot of places have large drink machines in the back (just like the ones you use when you go to burger king for example) and then they can’t bring that to the table to refill the drink.
In the restaurant I worked at we had a bunch of drink canisters that all fed into a common nozzle at the end of a nice long hose. Press one button on the nozzle and you got coke, another gave you diet, orange … I couldn’t stretch that thing to someone’s table!
Good lord. No matter what you asked for, if it wasn’t rude, treating you like that is stupid and inappropriate.
And asking to actually get what you’ve asked for is way far from rude!
As long as it’s not a fast food place, any request you make, whether it’s their normal procedure or not, should be met with either “Sure!” or “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that; is there something else I can do for you?”
Especially in the age of rufies and what-have-you, asking for your glass to stay in sight is completely reasonable.
But this is insane! Your glass doesn’t begin in your sight! If the waiter is intent on poisening you, they’ll just slip the poisen in the first glass. If they want to give you a dirty glass, they’ll do that right from the get-go, too.
Even if they pour soda into a pitcher, and use that pitcher to refill your glass, there is room for unsanitary practices and alteration. Plus it’s just plain wasteful. The could bring you a new glass, but once again, lord knows what goes on with that glass between the kitchen and your table.
There is no way that the gesture of refilling your glass at the table will garentee much of anything (although it will prevent switched drinking glasses, which is only a problem when multiple glasses are involved), Your only option for complete control is drinking from only from sealed bottles. Otherwise, all your insistance is just petty absurdeties to a restraunt that is trying to feed and water people, not calm their phsychosis with whatever wierd rituals people insist on.
I’ll chime in with those who are saying that this can be carried a mite too far. Unless you bring your own glass, you just can’t know about the sanitation conditions. You just have to survive on faith that they do some sort of cleaning back there and that your immune system is in working order. Make too much of a stink and you may get a spotless glass with a loogie in it.
Here’s my peeve, as an illustration: It oogs me out when the waitress comes at my plate with a baggie over her hand, grabs my leftover steak, pulls the baggie over it. and ties a knot. Bleh. I’d rather have a box, or have them do that in the kitchen. But I don’t make a stink, because that’s how they do it in that particular establishment. They probably don’t have any boxes, and I don’t want to hassle the waitress by making her make an extra trip to the back just to save my precious eyeballs the sight of her bagged claw coming at my plate. So I let her do it, and Mr. S and I exchange a glance (he knows I hate it). End of story. It’s really no big deal.
I did, however, draw the line for one bartender. My friend and I had returned our margaritas to the bar because they were devoid of flavor (not booze, but raspberry syrup). We had both tasted our own drinks. The bartender tasted one of them to test it, shrugged, poured them both into the blender, added more syrup, whisked them up, and poured them back out for us. :eek: We went to the other bartender, who got us two new drinks.
My beef is when they automaticly assume anything with a lemon in it is iced tea. I’ve had a waitress come around with a pitcher of iced tea and dump it in my half-empty glass of cola without even blinking. If s/he would’ve just asked “more tea?” I could’ve saved everyone some time by saying “actually it’s soda.” Now you have to take my whole drink away and re-do everything.
I also hate it when they try to put the food in the box for you. I have no idea why that is, and it may be my strangest quirk. I once nearly bit the head off a guy at the Olive Garden because he refused to just hand me the container and let me do it. He thought I was trying to save him time or something and kept going “no, no…it’s alright” until I yelled: “GIVE! ME! THE! BOX! NOW!” (Don’t worry, I left him extra in his tip, poor thing.)
Is this topic about refills as in when they refill your drink for free or if ordering the same drink again?
We dont have free refills in the UK, it seems odd that businesses offer it, surely if someone wants the extra drink they should charge them for it and make more money?
The only place I’ve seen it here is in Pizaa Hut adn they’re always very nice and efficient when they do it.
If memory serves (and quite often, mine doesn’t:)), we didn’t have free refills here until about 10 years ago. Then, one of the fast food places (a major one, but I don’t remember which one), started advertising free soft-drink refills. So, in the interest of competition, the others all jumped on the band wagon. Eventually, free refills became the rule rather than the exception (although, even in the past year or two I’ve been to places where they charge, say 39 cents, for a refill).
As to the OP, my free refills are either in fast food places where you take your own cup up to the counter and they refill while you watch, or the waitress brings pitchers of various beverages to the table and refills your glasses from the pitchers. If I was truly worried about germs, I probably wouldn’t eat out.
:eek: You have got to be joking. The only time I’ve seen that done was when a neighbor was picking up her dog’s poop off the sidewalk. I’m with you on not wanting my food handled like garbage being discarded. It’s probably more sanitary to bag it that way rather than scoop it into a box, but jeez.