He never said that restaurants should “change their operations”. He asked the OP how much of a problem it would be. There’s a big difference. Of course, if it was me wanting something boxed immediately, I’d just order a take-out box to be delivered with the meal, and box half of it before I started to eat.
As for the OP, I can certainly see turning away “just coffee” parties during rush hours. If there are several friends there, just drinking coffee, they’re likely to take at least as long as a couple ordering dinner, and maybe even longer. And the profit margin just doesn’t work out. I might be clueless enough to walk into an upscale place and not know it’s right in the middle of the dinner rush, but if it were explained to me politely, I wouldn’t be offended at all.
Alternatively, if you wanted take-out, you could just go to a take-out place. Sort of like people who just want coffee should go to a coffee shop. Is it that hard to understand?
That’s just stupid. I worked in restaurants for years, and was always happy to provide food to customers who wanted it to go. Likewise, small requests such as the one we are discussing here are part of the price (and tip) customers pay for their meal.
Neither small requests nor orders placed to go are in any way comparable to a customer who is creating a tangible and significant loss of business.
Or, in addition to tdn’s rationale, the diner plans to bring half the meal home for another person. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want half a steak that someone else has been eating from. That’s just gross.
Well, if it has tooth marks in it. A stranger’s tooth marks. That’d be gross.
The only special requests I ever make is if they’ll leave a sauce or mayo off something.
My husband is bizarre because he doesn’t like any condiments, dressings, syrups, butter, salsa, sour cream, anything. But we’ve never had anyone say anything but “Absolutely” when one of us asks for a sauce or similar thing to be left off.
Oh, and at Long John Silver, he asks for extra fries instead of slaw. They have no problem with that, either. I do. That’s a lot of fries.
What annoyed me was that I wasn’t trying to take the last table in the place. There was more than one four seat table empty. The manager was apparently just saving them for potential groups that might arrive. And while doing so was turning away actual customers.
I work in cafes and restuarants and currently a cafe/garden centre which is open in the evenings because we’re across the highway from the cinema, where a lot of older couples go because it’s not Hoyts/Greater Union and hence not full of teenagers. We specialise in coffee/cake diners who come in after the movies and we make an absolute killing from what the restaurants across the street turn away (it is usually around 7:30 - 8 because they are much older couples), but that’s because we have them in abundance and we offer actual meals.
I agree with the previously mentioned opinions; who goes to a considerably upscale restaurant and orders coffee in the dinner rush? Come to me instead!! I’ll make you a lovely coffee and you’ll get it cheaper than at Satan’sPissStarBucks.
It is also unfair to assume that restaurants stock everything that you require, if it isn’t on the menu. I have served several people who were appalled that we refused to make our pancake batter with a particular brand of milk for them. Well, sorry buddy but the pancake batter was made this morning before you were consulted. The twenty other people who ordered pancakes today didn’t seem to care either way. Can I offer you something else?
I was once tipped very well for not charging a woman who brought in her own caffeine free teabags. She said that she loved tea but not Chai tea (apparently is caffeine free but I cannot verify this) so she had her own ceylon tea bags. She said many cafes charged her the same amount for bringing in her own tea bags. If she only drank the tea, understandably, but she ordered a large meal for herself and her two kids and they both had the $4.50 milkshakes. The cost of a pot of tea comes up as; $1.50 for the teabag itself (we sold rarer teas for $3 a pot), $0.50 for the milk if it was served with and $0.50 for the dishpig to stick the tea cup and pot in the dishwasher.
Also, for when people wanted to go out and eat with friends but were on special diets, they often brought their own meals and paid us to heat them, even if we didn’t charge them because their friends bought food from us. They were always great tippers because we said ‘Sure, we’ll whack it in a saucepan and serve it to you piping hot.’
So, in the case of special diets; Ask if they have a particular whateveritisyouneed and if they can prepare it a certain way. Because bigger restaurants have several cooks who do a particular thing each; one will do ‘sides’ - salads, potato chips, one will do ‘meat dishes’ and so on. In the further upscale restaurants, the cook is a chef and they will have several dishes that they take pride in because they do them well. They may be willing to compromise if you’re allergic to coriander but not if you want it to be completely different. Just order something else.
I’ve never worked in an upscale restaurant, but I have in enough “good old boy” establishments, that even have peak times also, to offer the flip side of the frying pan here. So, what’s it like if you (generically speaking), single diner, aren’t turned away during the rush time? Well, you not only run the risks of what’s already been discussed here, but of also losing more business because the larger parties get pissed off waiting, and waiting and waiting some more while one person nurses a cup of coffee and smokes cigarettes endlessly. And it always seems that these groups have lots of friends, who in turn tell their friends, not to bother. Because, you know, those assholes just don’t care about anything but taking care of their friends. Plus, as a waitress, these folks always have tons of problems that they need you to attend to, right now, with an unbelievable amount of conversation thrown in.
Gee, did I hate that part of the job. I suppose it goes without saying that they usually only spent money on the check (I refuse to use the blow-up-the-thread T word!) and were messy to boot. Of course, I can’t imagine a single Doper ever behaving that way. Y’all want anything to go?
Don’t you have Cafes in the US or something? Actually, I know you do because I’ve had coffee in them before. Why on earth would you want to go to a sit-down restaurant and order a cup of coffee? Isn’t that what Starbucks, IHOP, Denny’s, and Diners are generally for?
I agree, at least in the case of ethnic (sic) restaurants where there’s the white menu and the non-written [ethnicity] menu. If I’m eating Korean food, I’ll ask for the extended kimchee choices rather than just taking the little bowl of default bland bean sprouts.
Reading this thread makes me glad I don’t live in a big city. While service is sometimes slow in my community, there seems to be a commitment on the part of the restaurants to accommodating a pretty wide range of dietary requests, and a great many choices explicitly named on the menus (e.g., vegetarian vs meat stock for a soup; substitution of steamed vegetables for pasta, fresh fruit instead of homefries). As compared to the Wendy’s in Cody, where they just couldn’t figure out how not to put butter on my to-go potato.
Shoshana: I’d like the baked potato to go, with no butter please.
Shining Example of Local Talent: That comes with butter.
Shoshana: I would like it without butter, please.
SELT: We don’t make them that way.
Shoshana: How can that be? You pick up the potato, cut it open, and put a pat of butter on it. I just want you not to do that.
SELT: We still have to charge you for the butter.
Shoshana: That’s fine (since there isn’t, in fact, a charge for the butter, which is included in the price).
SELT: But we still have to give you the butter for inventory control.
Shoshana: Fine, you can give it to me and I’ll put it in the trash.
SELT: But that’s wasting!
A second, perhaps managerial, SELT now appears and the conversation is repeated, to similar effect. Finally, SELT2 decides that it can be rung up using the “potato” key since there is no “potato without butter” key.
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.
You could do that? We weren’t technically allowed (tho’ in my case, it wasn’t people bringing in special diet food so much as burgers and fries from the Wendy’s two doors down, because their kids didn’t want Caribbean food). We were actually told that we weren’t supposed to let them bring in outside food AT ALL, because of the liability issues that would befall us if the Wendy’s burger, consumed on our premises, turned out to contain arsenic. However, most waitstaff would simply offer to bring a plate, glass and (if necessary) utensils for the outside food, so that Junior wouldn’t be eating out of a paper bag while Mom & Dad ate from plates.
You would love Mari, then. My cow-orkers (word chosen with utmost care and my apologies to cows the world over) called her Morticia. She had the longest raven’s-wing hair and the only make-up she wore was “Cleo-style” eyeliner.
We were a group of 14-17, going to eat at the same restaurant every week M-Th. When I joined, the project had been going on for over a year. It was in a factory, situated in an industrial area; Mari was our usual waitress in the industrial area’s restaurant. As those restaurants usually do, this one served large portions for pretty cheap prices; it had “platos combinados” (for example, salad+ham omelette+fries+green peppers), a daily menu, a more-expensive general menu and sandwiches. Cloth tablecloths and cloth napkins. Most seconds came with a side of french fries: if you asked for it “with salad” they’d bring it in a larger plate, with both salad and fries; you had to say “with salad, no fries” if that’s what you wanted; if you said “no sides”, they brought fries anyway because the notion of someone not wanting the whole portion was just uncomprehensible. We got a copy of the daily menu and marked how many of each we wanted.
When she got it, she counted to make sure that the order didn’t include nonexistant dishes (which she knew would be the fault of out Finance guy, and she was occasionally known to hit him with a knotted napkin for it) or too many orders. Most of the team behaved like five year olds and that’s exactly how she treated them.
/shrug … than don’t eat at my busy restaurant. The best part about restaurants is that there are enough of them that you can choose where you want to go. And restaurants can choose how they wish to run their own business.
If the two don’t coincide, you go somewhere else, and we put different bums in our seats than yours. Works out well for everyone.
Not in its natural state; it’s just black tea with spices, and black tea of course contains caffeine (actually the highest caffeine level of all teas). You can get it “decaffeinated,” but that also contains a trace of caffeine, just not as much as the regular stuff.
Scarlett, chai lover who’s not supposed to have caffeine, and so must limit her chai
No need for me to tell Starbucks. Starbucks and probably everyone reading this thread with the apparent exception of you understand what I said.
That’s why Starbucks has only a couple of Barristas, some scones and various coffee production lines invested while a restaurant has waiters, cooks, busboys, fryers, ovens, stoves, chillers, dishwashers and host(ess)es in their business model.
My statement was an observation of the business cashflow and had nothing to do with who decides what.
Your one trick pony “manager is the rulemaker” argument makes no sense as a retort to my comment.
Some advice - You may actually have to read and comprehend what others say before you reply.
