# If Your Diet is That Frigging Complicated, Eat At Home! **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [October 30, 2006, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455 "2006-10-30T17:52:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Carlyjay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Carlyjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carlyjay)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2006, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/121 "2006-11-01T14:12:45Z")
[QUOTE=pool] Ok completely random but I hate it when waiters/waitresses refer to the restaurant they work in as if they own them and don’t just work there. [/QUOTE] That’s sad. You’ve obviously never worked in the service industry. Start your own pitting if something this silly upsets you. ---
**Author:** ![D\_Odds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/d_odds/32/2882_2.png) [@D\_Odds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/D_Odds)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2006, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/122 "2006-11-01T14:54:29Z")
[QUOTE=Sonia Montdore] Customers aren’t always right. Or pleasant. My husband and I were waiting in a restaurant lobby for a table. There was a party of six in line ahead of us. A table for two opened up, and the hostess beckoned to my husband and me. The six people in front of us immediately began shouting that this was unfair, that Mr. Montdore and I had arrived after them and should not be seated until they got a table. The hostess explained, nicely, that the table for two wouldn’t do them any good because six people couldn’t fit around it, and that the restaurant would lose money if any table stayed empty. Nonetheless, the party of six continued to yell. When my husband and I tried to squeeze past them to enter the dining room, one of the six kicked me. I complained to the hostess, who summoned the manager, who listened to my story and threw all of them out. [/QUOTE] I always enjoy stories of managers doing the right thing and recognizing customers who are not worth the effort. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Swan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a87d85/32.png) [@The\_Swan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Swan)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2006, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/123 "2006-11-01T16:02:03Z")
[QUOTE=Carlyjay] That’s sad. You’ve obviously never worked in the service industry. Start your own pitting if something this silly upsets you. [/QUOTE] I have, and servers who do that bug the crap out of me too. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Swan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a87d85/32.png) [@The\_Swan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Swan)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2006, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/124 "2006-11-01T16:03:14Z")
[QUOTE=The Swan] I have, and servers who do that bug the crap out of me too. [/QUOTE] To clarify: “I have several specials tonight, but I’m out of the fish.” ---
**Author:** ![Carlyjay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Carlyjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carlyjay)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2006, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/125 "2006-11-01T16:43:55Z")
[QUOTE=The Swan] To clarify: “I have several specials tonight, but I’m out of the fish.” [/QUOTE] Oh, okay. I thought you meant servers who say “when people come into my restaurant” or something. Which is a common thing people do in any job: “When I go to my store” or “when people go to my company’s picnic”. Sorry for flying off the handle. That phrasing bothers me too. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![The\_Swan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a87d85/32.png) [@The\_Swan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Swan)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2006, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/126 "2006-11-01T17:25:28Z")
[QUOTE=Carlyjay] Oh, okay. I thought you meant servers who say “when people come into my restaurant” or something. Which is a common thing people do in any job: “When I go to my store” or “when people go to my company’s picnic”. Sorry for flying off the handle. That phrasing bothers me too. 🙂 [/QUOTE] Right-o. Most people refer to their company as “my company”, and I wanted to clarify that that wasn’t what I meant. ---
**Author:** ![pool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pool/32/4152_2.png) [@pool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pool)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2006, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/127 "2006-11-01T18:30:46Z")
> [@](#): > > originally posted by **Carllyjay** > That’s sad. You’ve obviously never worked in the service industry. Actually I have. ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2006, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455/128 "2006-11-02T06:26:24Z")
[QUOTE=Shoshana] However, I turned my back at a crucial moment to get a napkin, and 10 miles down the road opened my potato (which I wanted without butter because I can’t eat that much simple carbohydrate at once and was going to divide for multiple servings) to discover that they hadn’t managed not to plit the top and butter it anyway. Clearly the tension was too intolerable. [/QUOTE] I can personally verify that the single most difficult special request for a breakfast cook is “dry toast”. Simply because “make toast” is, to a breakfast cook, effectively a single action rather than a series of steps. The toast pops up, you grab it with your left hand as you simultaneously grab the butter knife with your right hand and smear that butter. It’s all one motion that takes about half a second, and you have repeated this motion over and over and over. It’s a task that the cook doesn’t even think about. Leaving off the butter requires active, deliberate concentration if you want to override your muscle memory. I eventually came up with a solution: when I scanned the ticket and saw the words “dry toast”, the very first thing I would do, even before I put the hashbrowns on the grill, was place a side plate on top of the butter container. Then when the toast popped up a few minutes later and I reached for the butter knife, I’d hit the plate and say, “Oh yeah! No butter!” I imagine it’s similar for dinner cooks and baked potatoes. As for the OP and special requests … I currently work at the city convention center, where I’ve seen the chefs prepare meals for groups of 800+. In a situation like this, everybody gets the same thing, naturally. Unless they’re a vegetarian. The captains and banquet managers make sure to find out exactly how many vegetarians or vegans there are in the group, and report this number to the executive chef. The chef prepares that many vegetarian or vegan dishes for those people. These special dishes are every bit as nice and tasty as the regular dishes. Invariably, there will be one vegetarian in the group who looks at the plate and tells the server, “Oh, I don’t want this. I just want a big plate of vegetables.” Um, well, that’s what you’ve got, fool. But the server will smile politely at this picky person who doesn’t realize that you don’t get to order ala carte at a bigass convention, and come back to the kitchen looking for plain old vegetables. Problem is, the executive chef has been doing these conventions for a few decades, and has become an expert at purchasing and preparing precisely the right amount of each item to feed the intended number of attendees. So there are no more vegetables in the pot. The server is then reduced to pulling unclaimed meals (dished up for people who decided not to show up) out of the warmer cart and scraping the vegetables off of several of those plates onto a single plate for the special customer. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-your-diet-is-that-frigging-complicated-eat-at-home/378455.md?page=6)