Oh yes, the “doggie bag grab” is de rigueur in your standard stuck-in-the-sixties Wisconsin supper club. Lovely tradition. ::barf:: At least they only do it for a piece of meat, and not, say, spaghetti.
Oh my goodness! I can’t believe that’s really true! Using the dog poop scoop maneuver to wrap your leftovers? Right in front of you? Gag barf ewwww!
I agree with Amanita that it might well be a good way to wrap leftover steak, but it should be done out of sight for Og’s sake. I’ve noticed that in some chain-restaurant type places, if you ask for the leftovers to be wrapped, they actually hand you a box. Bizarre. If I wanted to wrap my own leftovers, I’d eat at home. Do they expect me to sweep the floor too?
Topic? I don’t really care about the first two points, but I hate hate hate being left without a drink. To me, that is the #1 most irksome (and easily avoided) service problem.
I’ve been waiting tables for the past four years. Almost every single place I’ve worked has done it this way:
If you order water or tea we refill it at the table with a pitcher.
Sodas are refilled by bringing out a new glass BEFORE removing the other glass.
Coffee is brought out in the pot.
I don’t handle your food after it is brought out to you. If you want to take it home I will bring you a box, but I will not put it in there for you. It is not easy to put food in a box without either messing it up or touching it in some way. I don’t want anyone touching my food and I don’t want to touch any one else’s. Plus I have no idea exactly what you want to take home. Not every one takes everything on their plate.
If you have a decent server then your drinks should be automatically refilled (or the new one brought) as soon as your glass reaches half empty. That is unless you’re a quick drinker. I’ve refilled drinks before just to turn around and see they’re empty again within two minutes.
BTW, I thought that refilling a used glass at the soda fountain was against health code.
People are way too squeemish about food in general. A few thousand years ago, you’d be eating live bugs and loving it. Now we freak out if oh my god our glass might not be labratory clean.
I agree with SenorBeef here, just get over it. A germ from a cup is not going to kill you. I consider myself to be as anti-prudish when it comes to matters like these. I eat with my hands without washing them, knwong that I have been doing unsanitary things with them. I eat food off the floor past the ten second rule, I share glasses and bottles with other people, Hell, just last week I made a sandwich with some bread. It tasted a little off, but no mold, it was OK. That night, I took another piece of bread, and saw that part of it was moving…oh, a maggot on the bread, yeah, I guess it was a little old. I threw out the rest of the loaf, did I retch at the thought that I ate a piece of bread that might have touched a maggot, or that I may have even eaten a maggot myself? NO! Why? IT DOESN’T FREAKIN’ MATTER!!
Soda is dirty cheap, so even if a customer gets 3-4 refills, charging $1.50-$2.00 a glass the restaurant is still coming out ahead. Most places make a deal with their Coke or Pepsi distributor to carry one or the other’s products, and by doing so they get a discount. The place I manage carries Coke prodcuts and we pay about $15 for a box of syrup which can produce roughly 400 glasses of soda. The reason is because our servers are told to fill the glasses with ice, so the actual soda content of the glass is about 1/4 the volume. So, the average customer gets something like 1.2 refills per soda ordered, fast forward the math and you get a net profit of $485 per box of syrup. That is a markup of over 3,000%. Not too shabby huh?
Now, just think how much those movie theater concession and major sporting event concession companies are making off of sodas…
I like it when they put a fresh glass right down at the table, just before I’ve emptied the first glass, so there is no waiting while they go off to get a replacement.
The drink mix-up concept doesn’t bother me…neither am I concerned with what they might do to my glass “back there,” as I’m already more or less at their mercy what with them having prepared my food without my supervision and all.
Some of you people need other things to worry about.
Bah! MY ancestors only ate dead, freshly killed bugs, never live ones. What sort of uncultured forebears did you have? Harumph.
( 
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BTW: I ate a bug earlier today. It got sucked into my mouth as I was running to catch the bus and I accidentally chomped on it. It was the blandest bug I’ve ever eaten. Quite disappointing.
It’s way easier to transfer the food into the box in the kitchen than at the table. When I worked as a waitress, we generally would open the box, pick up the plate, and scrape the food into the box. Quick and sanitary. If I’m trying to do it at the table, I’m trying to pick up the food off the plate and place it in the box. That’s a lot harder to do without dropping something.
Huh? Eating in a restaurant basically requires that strange people touch your food. If you don’t want people touching your food (and you want to ensure that it wasn’t dropped on the floor and chucked back on the plate in the kitchen) just don’t eat out. As others in this thread have said, the customer doesn’t know what goes on back there anyway. And if they do know, having worked in a restaurant themselves, they are deliberately choosing to not worry about it.
Then you should ask. If I ask for something to be wrapped and I don’t say anything, I assume I’ll get everything on the plate. If the waiter isn’t sure what I want, he asks. If I want only one part of the meal wrapped, I’ll say so–“Just the steak please.” I suppose that if I ever wanted to do the wrapping myself, I’d ask for that, and I’d expect that request to be honored.
Part of the point of eating in a decent restaurant is that they take care of the “work” part of the meal while you get to do the fun part.
I’ll gladly eat in places where I have to do some of the “work” part, like ordering at the counter and carrying my meal to a table on a tray, but I expect the prices and/or tipping expectations to reflect that.
I just remembered I used to work with a guy who wouldn’t eat anything if he saw someone touch it. All you had to do was say “wow, those fries look good” and gently touch one with the very tip of your finger and he’d pass the whole plate to you: burger, fries and all. We’d all crack up at him and say “how do you think it gets on the plate?!?!” and he’d say “if I can’t see it, it doesn’t bother me.”
Geez, talk about ignorance being bliss!
If we take food back into the kitchen, we have to throw it away, that’s why we bring the box to the table, not at all because we’re lazy.
mouthbreather is right. There are people in this thread that make Adrain Monk look like a spontaneous gem loving wild man.
I didn’t mean to imply that you doing it because you were lazy. Sorry if it came off that way. I assume that the policy on wrapping leftovers came from the restaurant, not the individual servers.
But why would you have to throw away the food if it goes back into the kitchen? Is it some kind of law? If it is a law, whre do you live? Is it a policy of the restaurant? And even if it were a law, couldn’t you wrap it at the waitstand? (Not challenging you, just looking for explanations.)
It’s against health code to take food back into the kitchen. There is too much possibility for contamination.
Most places the wait stands are not that big and are often too busy to be scraping plates into a box.
I’ve never really thought of it. I guess I don’t care that much. I trust the waiter.
Well, over here in Germany they figure if they charge $3.00 a glass without offering free refills they will be coming out even more ahead. If it’s that cheap. The other day I had to pay five bucks for a glass of Coke. I almost fell off my chair when the bill came. (Not having checked the menu for the drinks prices was a mistake, obviously, but who’d have thought??)
Free refills. If I could get them I’d take somebody handling my glass (that they handled before, as lots of people mentioned) any day now.
Do you have a cite for that? It was definitely not against health codes in the restaurants where I worked (NY and PA, 1987-1994) and when I ask for food to be wrapped now (NJ and NY, usually) it is taken away and brought back wrapped. The restaurants where I worked did not have any official policies or equipment that was in violation of health codes.
I’ve just been going off of what I’ve been told by my managers. I tend to trust what they tell me about the health code policies. It could just be my state or even my town.
The place I worked here in Houston told me that we weren’t allowed to bring food back into the kitchen due to health code. I can’t cite you anything, but that’s what the waitstaff was told.
However, I have eaten at places in Canada and other states where they did take the food away, and bring it back wrapped up.