INCREDIBLY bad and very weird restaurant experience

The BBQ Pit
1

I can no longer locate the “worst restaurant experiences” thread, but this was so unbelievably bad, I simply must share. My husband’s extended family met last night at a restaurant for a birthday dinner for a family friend. There are ten of us in all. This is a fairly well known and highly regarded local restaurant. My mother-in-law hosted, and planned to pick up the bill. She made reservations and told the hostess this was a birthday dinner for a dear friend of the family.

The service was bad throughout our dinner - so bad that today I sent off a blistering three page rant to the restaurant owner. I will not list every example of bad service we experienced (the SDMB doesn’t have that kind of bandwidth – it was THAT bad) but I thought you would enjoy some of the highlights.

My 12 year-old niece Mary, who is a vegetarian, ordered a vegetable appetizer and a salad for dinner. She didn’t get her appetizer when the rest of us got ours. She inquired and was told by the waitress that her salad would come with our dinners. Then, it happened: the waitress said to Mary, “You know, the salad you ordered is very small, but her <indicating my daughter> dinner is huge, so you can have half of hers.”

WHAT?!?!!?? She’s offering to give half my daughter’s dinner to my niece?? Not to mention that my daughter had ordered chicken.

Mary did get her app when the rest of us got our dinners, but she never got HER dinner salad. When she inquired again, the waitress said that she hadn’t ordered another salad. Mary said, “Yes, I did.” The waitress checked her order book and said, very firmly, “NO, you did NOT. Did I ask you what kind of dressing you ordered?” Mary said, “Yes, and I said vinaigrette and you said that was an unusual choice for a child my age.” The waitress then said, “Well, I didn’t write it down. If you’re still hungry you can have two desserts.”

Again, WHAT?!?!?!

More happened, all of it bad, then this final kicker: The waitress brought a dessert to our friend and gathered all the other wait staff to sing. They sang, “Happy birthday dear MOTHER, Happy birthday to you!” I quietly turned to one server and said “The lady is not the mother here. She’s a friend” to which this waitress replied, “Well, she is SOMEBODY’S mother, isn’t she?”

Well, yes, but we’re taking her out to dinner because her children are several states away, estranged, and did not bother to call their mother. And thank you SO much for making her feel good. Why don’t you give her a nice papercut and rub some salt into it while you’re at it?

Anyhow. Worst experience ever for me, and needless to say we’re not going back there, and the owner will shortly be in possession of the aforementioned blistering letter. I’m feeling better now. Thanks for listening!

2

Good grief. Can I please get a mod to close all those damn duplicates? Thank you in advance.

3

…GAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

That is hilarious!!!

I’m also sorry to hear about that restaurant experience. Damn shame it is…

4

This is positively freaky. Who in the hell would ever say something like that to a complete stranger?

More! More! What are some of the other examples of bad service?

5

Is it in bad form to name this restaurant? Granted, I do not live anywhere near you, but you never know.

That’s terrible. I’m sorry you had such a crappy deal at that place.

6

It’s very bad form. Do it anyway. I need to know where not to go.

7

I would have squashed the waitress like a bug…

8

[slight hijack] I’m still relatively new, so forgive my ignorance…but can you explain why it is in bad form? I read bad reviews of restaurants in the paper all the time.[/slight hijack] :confused:

9

Your post strangely comforts me LifeOnWry.

I used to think Nashville had the worst restaurant service in America. I stand corrected.

Thank you.

10

bangs on the table

More examples of crappy service! I demand more!

keeps banging

11

She probably thought it was OK to talk to a child that way, but I can’t believe she’d have the gall to do it around adults at the table, or to treat the lady celebrating her birthday like she did.

12

Why on Earth did you put up with that garbage? I would have had the manager over, complained quite loudly and specifically, and gotten the bill comped.

Never put up with bad service in restaurants. Going out to dinner is not like going to somebody’s house, where you have to put up with bullshit. Servers are there to bring you your food, quickly, accurately, and with no editorial comments. Remember, YOU are in charge-you’re the customer and you outrank them.

13

Way back in the sixties in England, before we even knew what food was for, my dad was in a restaurant in the Lake District.

The waitress carried a plate of chips (french fries) to his table with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. As she was putting it on the table, a length of ash fell off her cigarette onto the chips.

My dad said “excuse me, some ash has fallen on the food,” to which the waitress said “sorry love”, picked the plate up, and blew the ash off it. She put it back down, said “there you go,” and left!

14

gobear- normally I would have complained, loudly and vociferously. There are a couple reasons why I did not in this instance. First, this was my mother-in-law’s gig, and I was there as HER guest. Second, after my niece explained her situation to the waitress and got the reactions above, I realized we were dealing with a complete and total moron - thus, I decided to contact the restaurant owner later, as I couldn’t count on the waitress to actually FIND a manager. Third, I was really in shock, and part of me was waiting to see how much weirder things would get. As I said, I’m not even detailing the other examples of general bad service in this restaurant, I was just hitting the highlights!

As for the name of the restaurant - it’s a small, local-family-owned place in a small town… I’m going to give the owner a chance to respond to my complaint letter. I assure you, if the response is anything short of a complete refund of the bill for my MIL and a groveling apology, I’ll let y’all know!

15

Please, we want more! (Can we see the letter? Pretty please?)

16

:smiley: That reminds me of the Geico ad in the diner.
jjimm, there’s a funny commercial here in the States for a car insurance company (it’s about getting good service) that features a man in a diner who gets a sandwich and he says, “I didn’t want mayo,” and the waitress picks up the top slice of bread and wipes the mayo off on the edge of the table and then puts it back on his sandwich, and says, “There you go!”
Back to the OP…
I think the waitress had a lot of nerve in assuming that LifeOnWry’s daughter would be willing to share her dinner with her cousin! WTF was that about?

17

Really it’s reprehensible that a server would treat customers in that way, being so rude and even crude. Someone should have made a complaint while at the restaurant–really, at the first rude remarks. There is definitely -no excuse- for service like that, but if it had been reported while in the restaurant, I’d be willing to be that management would have groveled like crazy and probably even comped the cost.

Please let us know what you hear from the restaurant. And if it ever happens to anyone else while dining out, my advice is to speak up then!

Good luck!

18

Okey doke. From a trip to Zimbabwe a few years ago:

I ordered mushroom soup in the restaurant of the hotel we stayed at in Bulawayo. The waiter set the soup down in front of me, I took a couple of spoonfuls and realized it wasn’t mushroom soup at all. I mentioned this to the attentive waiter, who said “Oh, I’m sorry sir, that was for someone else”. He picks up the bowl, and I watch as he quickly crosses the room and sets it (the one I’d just sampled from) in front of another customer.

We were having a few drinks on the varanda of a Lake Kariba hotel; one of my traveling companions asks for a vodka and tonic. The waiter bustles off and soon returns with a glass of vodka…and a glass of tonic.

Man, I loved that place…

Oh, yeah, and in France, a little hotel in Chamonix run by a dour, faintly Germanic woman. For breakfast, each guest was entitled to one pot of tea or coffee and a small basket of bread. These items were precisely measured and the goods placed on a set of shelves, each marked with a table number; the hostess would bring your breakfast from the appropriate shelf whenever you showed up in the morning. The first morning, a guest sitting at the next table finished off his pot of coffee and called the hostess over. “Excuse me”, he sez, “could I have some more coffee, please?”. Totally deadpan, the hostess looks him over and simply says “No”.

19

I have, very rarely, fired people. Yes, I may be a lowly customer, but I have fired one restaurant server, and many telephone tech service people. I look at them (when it is bad) and say, “You are fired. Get me another server.” The look on their face alone is worth the price of admission, but it brought out the manager, the assistant manager, and at least two more servers during the course of the meal. Probably confuses the hell out of people, but it works.

20

My best friend B and I were in a certain “Awful House” one late night. We are friends with some of the waitresses, because we go there so often.

This particular night, we had a waitress we’d never seen before. She was an older woman, probably in her 60’s. She came and took our drink orders, and brought our coffee. B orders a bowl of chili and an order of eggs and hashbrowns. I get the chicken sandwich.

When she brings out the food, she has her thumb clearly in the bowl. She sets the chili down, looks at her thumb, and procedes to stick it in her mouth. B just looked at her and said, “I hope you know you’re going to bring me another bowl of chili, preferably without your thumb in it.” She sighed, picked up the bowl, and walks away with it. He never got another bowl, so I’m assuming she couldn’t carry a bowl of chili without putting her thumb in it.

She also never returned to refill our coffee, or to check on us. She dropped by once, to drop off the check. We paid the check, and gave the tip to the other server (who was standing next to our waitress), because she was the only one who was really working.