Has anyone been so fed up with their experience at a restaurant that they left without paying?
Sort of…my buds and I had a good lunch at Friendly’s, then went to the cash register to pay, where we were ignored for 10 minutes by several employees who were seemingly not doing anything else. So we ran for it. The restaurant was in a mall, so we had rentacops chasing us and everything. As a result I was banned for life from the Mall in Columbia, MD. I’ve broken this ban approximately 600 times since then. Don’t tell on me.
No, but I’ve had restaurants so fed up with me that they kicked me out. 
I’ve had a couple of incidents where the service was so bad, I suggeted not leaving a tip, but invariably someone will feel guilty (“I may want to come back here again, what if they remember me,” etc.) and shell out the money. And there have been several other times when someone in my party would have been justified in demanding that an item be removed from the tab-- wrong dish served and not replaced until everyone else was done eating, stuff like that. However it seems my friends are too nice to push the issue, and frankly I don’t like making a scene myself. Mostly I figure I just won’t go back to a place if it’s truly awful.
Actually…
Once my siblings, their spouses & I left a Chi-Chi’s without paying for our drinks. We had been sitting there waiting to order dinner for almost an hour & the waitress didn’t seem to want to take our order… so, we left.
We did however tell her on the way out we were leaving & “Thanks for the drinks”.
on the flip side of this discussion id like to defend some of the waiters and waitresses out there who occasionally provide bad service due to no fault of their own…
take, for example, the case where i was once stuck serving in a private (in-theory-reservation-only) dining room where we expected 6 people to show up and ended up with 34…i was working alone, and the chef was going totally out of his mind trying to keep up. one guest accused me of serving slowly and caused me problems all night long…apparently an hour and a half is WAY too long for this man and his family to eat a 5 course meal in… thankfully for me in this particular establishment meals are signed over to a person’s tab, and since we know the member’s names, they cant get away without paying!
i did, however, once have to wait an hour and a half in a restauraunt for a hamburger… so i can definitely relate to the rest of you as well!
Some years back, my girlfriend and I went to a mid-scale seafood restaurant for dinner. Nothing on the menu really interested her so she just ordered a meal that with a chicken breast as the main entree.
When our food arrived, her plate contained two chicken breasts. I mentioned it to the waitress, who said that she’d make sure that the bill was correct, and left us to eat.
About 2 minutes later she came back to the table with a pair of forks, explained that, “the manager said I have to take this back to the kitchen”, and proceeded to remove a piece of chick from the plate and leave.
I stiffed the waitress and never returned.
SouthernStyle
No. It’s a risk you take when you go out.
If someone does not show up for work, or an unusually large crowd shows up, service can be poor.
If they get a new cook, the food will not be like you remembered it.
As a customer, if you are a picky eater, order something safe or it’s your fault if you don’t like the way they fix it.
Once a friend and her husband suggested that we all go to a local restaurant for lunch, because they liked the fried clams. I was starving (no breakfast that day), so, what the heck, try a place I’d never been.
At the time, I was on a “eat healthy” kick, so I ordered grilled chicken. When my order arrived, it was fried chicken. I was so hungry, and time was so short by then, I decided to go ahead and eat it anyway.
But, the middle was QUITE raw, and in both pieces. I told the waiter (who was actually the manager, you’d think he’d know how food service works), who scooped up my meal and dashed back to the kitchen. Sheesh, he could have left my baked potato, thought I; it was on a different plate, and I would at least have had SOMETHING to eat.
By the time the check came, my order still hadn’t arrived, and we needed to get back to work. So, I didn’t get to eat at all. I didn’t pay for that meal, and the manager told me he’d give me a free meal the next time I came back. As if I would, dude.
Once. I ordered a “well-done” hamburger and a salad at a coffee shop in NY. The burger was so rare that if you put a Band-Aid on it, it would have healed; and the salad was full of sand.
Well, I’ve never left without paying, but I’ve left without tipping. Numerous times. Needless to say, I haven’t been back to those restaurants since.
Kind of.
Was at the Disneyland IHOP around 12:30am following a concert. Unfortunately the Disneyland had unexpectedly remained open until midnight (scheduled 10 p.m. close) so the midnight crowd was much larger than expected.
To make matters worse, there was only one cook working and he was about 2 days new. Took us about half an hour to be seated and then the real wait began. After another twenty minutes we were able to place our order. Almost an hour after that we decided it just wasn’t going to work and just left the restaurant.
While waiting we had watched at least 20 people leave before their food had arrived. As we were leaving the manager was pleading with a party of 12 that their food had just come up and would they please stay. The party left anyway.
Hopefully the wait staff we efficient at letting the kitchen know which people had left otherwise they had to throw away at least 30 meals.