A locally famous Italian restaurant called Little Italy.
We (Mr. Levins and I) never even ate there; we walked in and the “hostess”–who was obviously either a manager or owner or something–never even made eye-contact with us for 7 minutes while we waited at the door to be seated. (We counted.)
She was too busy talking to the family who’d walked in ahead of us, who were obviously either friends or regulars. She never even paused to say, “Be right with you guys!” No eye-contact, no acknowledgement of us at all, forever, while she made small talk with these people. Another manager walked up, and we assumed that he would seat us, but he just started talking to the people, too, and then walked right past us!
We might as well have been invisible. Or figments of our own imaginations.
And by the time she finally sat the people ahead of us, there were already three/four groups behind us as well.
So she comes back to us and says, “How many?” Not “Sorry about that!” or “Thanks for waiting!” or anything. Just a chirpy “How many?”
And we said, “Two for smoking, please.”
And she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have smoking on weekends. You might be able to eat at the bar; I’ll check on that in a minute, but let me go ahead and take care of these other people.”
And with that, that crazy bitch sat ALL the groups behind us!Never even glanced at us again!
We failed to understand why THEY were suddenly important, when WE’D been so obviously unimportant for the last ten minutes. If you have the time to waste shooting the breeze with friends for ten minutes, why don’t you have the time to check with the bar, which was within thirty feet of the door?
So we turned around and walked out, and we’ve resisted all attempts by anyone to get us to darken that door again. She didn’t even wait to see if we’d take non-smoking! We’d have been happy to sit in non-smoking–we were unaware of their non-smoking policy on weekends–but her attitude pissed us off so badly we decided that they didn’t deserve our money.
Ever.
Hell, for all I know they might have smoking on weekends. Maybe she just didn’t want us in her fucking restaurant. :shrug: Who the hell knows! I’m not gonna beg anybody to let me give them money.