Dominic Mulligan, I think that the objection is that he seems unable to see an alternate point of view surrounding this situation, even though multiple people that are experienced in how the restaurant industry works have explained over and over again how things work and why they work that way.
hell in any industry that will happen. some server may have been ill. they may have called in a replacement, but the replacement hasn’t arrived yet. Unless it typically happened, I’d not blame the management for being temporarily short handed. Especially in the restauarant trade.
Sounds like you haven’t spent any time in the food service industry.
To put it simply, every restaurant runs by Murphys law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Shit happens. It’s nobodys fault.
To go long distance with the explanation, managing a hotel dining room is very difficult. You never really know how many people you are going to get and how many people to staff. Most places will have a house count available in a week or two in advance for scheduling, but lord knows how accurate it’s going to be. You never know how many people you are going to have until the day it happens. Somedays noone comes in for breakfast. Somedays everyone in the hotel comes in for breakfast. Somedays everyone in the hotel comes in for breakfast and has their family/friends/anybody else who happened to be in the neighborhood with them. You certainly cannot staff heavy every day of the week. You’d be losing oodles of money if you did. You do the best you can with the staff you have and the budget you have. This means that you are going to be overstaffed or understaffed from time to time. Again, it’s nobodys fault.
I think he has a perfectly justified rant in saying he was hungry, they couldn’t seat him, they should have had more staff, they should have better back-up, their hostess should have explained things better, the front desk should have warned guests that there was a problem in the restaurant, etc.
But the title of the thread is: “Is it so hard to open a new section?” And yes, sometimes it is hard, for the reasons given in the thread.
Actually I have.
A good restaurant would much rather have a customer leave due to not getting a table than to leave due to getting crappy service. Opening up a section eliminates the shortage of tables, but increases the odds of the service sucking eggs. A good hostess will often pace customer seating for this same reason.
By the way, you said you’d “probably” do the buffett, so a good hostess is going to make damned sure that you can be waited on properly, just in case you do decide to order from the menu.
DId I say he wasn’t allowed to Pit, or even that he shouldn’t be Pitting? I was pointing about something that he might want to consider - his own apparent lack of experience in a field where many of the people responding had a great deal of experience, and then answering the question posed in the OP based on my own experience. He has every right in the world to be annoyed and irritated, to blow off steam - people here have simply been trying to get him to understand that while it may appear to be a trivially easily solved problem to him, it almost certainly wasn’t that simple for the restaurant in question. He’s still allowed to be pissed if he wants, but sometimes people are less irritated when they understand that a situation was probably NOT due to incompetence or indifference. It might actually make some people feel better. If the OP isn’t such a person, please pardon my (and others’ here) futile attempts to help.
Then where are you coming from calling it a cock up?
You wonder why it would be so hard for a restaurant that is short-staffed to physically move a few tables so that customers aren’t crammed in like sardines. In the case of the OP, apparently staff convenience/laziness outweighed customer comfort. Not a good recipe for a successful restaurant.
Sub-rant: Do not try to seat me in the bar area (when there are vacant tables elsewhere) without asking me first if it’s OK. And I know that there is an urge to fill up the really undesirable tables (by the kitchen door, up front near the reception desk in the highest traffic area etc.) even during off-peak hours, but I would really like a decent table when there are many available. These complaints typically have nothing to do with “staffing needs” and relate to average non-ritzy restaurants. It seems to be either a game by the staff or some kind of weird hoarding of good tables, just in case Julia Roberts and her entourage show up at the Outback. :dubious:
Well, to follow up, I was at the lunch buffet today. This time there was no hostess. People were told to “sit where you want”. And there was an emberassing surplus of staff including a lot of middle management bloat trying to look busy. It was more like “Leave me alone! I am now officialy OVERSERVED”. When the third guy that is not your server asks you if “everything is OK?” it is getting ridiculous. Can’t you see I am reading the paper?!?
So when they are busy they run a skeleton crew and when they are slack all hands on deck? Despite the protestations of some other dopers, perhaps it IS this hotel that has it’s head up it’s ass, restaurant-wise. I can’t get too many more samples as thank God I am out of here tomorrow for a hotel that is well regarded.
Another thing that I noticed today was that the tables were spaced further apart and more evenly. If the tables had been like that I probably wouldn’t have had a problem, but they really were wedging me in. These are the tables that allow two people to face each other and eat, but are no wider than the chair. It was like they took 3 tables for 2 that had been arranged to seat six, then split them 4/2 when two pairs came in, but didn’t really spread them that far (maybe 12"), then made my table out of half of the 4, with me in the middle splitting the already inadequate difference (if that makes any sense), so I really would have been wedged in to a narrow table between four other people with maybe 6" on each side, and this is the point of my personal space is being intruded on, and it is making it awkward if not impossible to get up to go to the buffet, read the paper, wipe my mouth, etc. The fact that she would offer me something like that was stupid right off the bat, and if you saw it you would know what I mean. It was unacceptable. The next thing would have been to ask all the other diners to grab their tables and chairs and “scootch down”.
As for people that think I am a demanding whiner, I eat out a lot and this is my first pit.
We must dine at the same Outback 
How plainer would you like me to make it? The restaurant didn’t have enough staff on hand to seat all the diners comfortably. Either politely refuse to allow anymore customers in or open a new section, don’t hem and haw initially agreeing to open a new section and then change your mind.
From Happy Wanderer’s last post, it seems that the restaurant has management problems.
Something I don’t like about restaurant seating: There have been times when I’ve gone to a restaurant and there’s us and maybe one or two other diners, and they seat us right next the other diner(s). The whole damn restaurant’s empty, couldn’t you space at least one table in between us?