Just so it’s clear. I never said there was no problem. The restaraunt definitely failed the customer here. I was just trying to explain how it is not necessarily the servers fault.
Sometimes he is the victim of the kitchen. Sometimes the victim of restaraunt policy, and sometimes it’s just plain his fault.
That’s all. We’re not really in disagreement here.
You can tell who the people are who have never worked in a restaurant.
You, know, it’s not really possible to perfectly calibrate the timing of each course for every single customer, especially when it’s busy. Fish cooks fast and food on the line isn’t always cooked in the exact linear order that the tickets come in. If a fish dish can be broiled quickly under a salmander and placed in the window without disrupting or delaying other orders than it will be done. In every kitchen I ever worked in the emphasis was on getting the orders out as fast as possible. Setting up custom times to cook each order so that the customer gets his food precisely when he’s done with his last spponful of soup would not have been possible or practical. Usually it works out ok. Sometimes you get your food a little early or a little late. Deal with it. There are people in the world with real problems.
And let me join the list of those who say that it’s not the server’s fault. They bring out the food when it comes up in the window. They get yelled at if they let it sit under the warmer. I know that for a fact. I’ve also never encountered a kitchen where a server had the option of holding onto an order so as to delay the course. They have no way of knowing how long something’s going to take so they run the risk of getting their food very late which translated into irate customers and bad tips. Very few customers complain about getting their food too quickly. It’s almost a guarantee when the food is too late.
I agree completely with this. Having worked in lots of restaurants for too many years, it could be anyone’s fault. Heck, a manager could have given the ticket early randomly. Stuff happens.
Most chain restaurants have strict time limits they like to enforce. Salads, soups and such at chain restaurants can take forever because of slack servers, a swamped salad side, problems with prepping or what have you. When I sauteed, grilled or chared, I was Senor Speedy and routinely beat out salads and even soups because of slack servers who took 20 minutes to run (not have the soup or salad prepped, but actually take the food to the table).
At the nicer restaurants I worked at, it was usually either bad set-ups for timing issues or a slack cold side (yes, soups are considered cold side items for most places). Either way, something just isn’t working right.
The best way is to communicate to your server how you want your meal. You see, I eat like my older brother is about to appear out of nowhere and snatch up my food and run away with it (which happened). Thus, I’ll have that soup done in three bites and be reaching for the main course as the server is putting it down.
If you eat slower, try and communicate that. Most servers do care about giving you a good experience (and not just because of tips: it is a personal and professional pride issue). So help them out by communicating with them about it.
To some extent it’s up to the customer to simply request that the meal be slowed down, and I’ve never had a waiter not comply (although they sometimes forget). However, some waiters just need to slow down.
I just went to the Olive Garden, and the waiter came to us as we ate our salads and asked if we were ready for the next course. I thanked him for asking and said we were. Meanwhile, the fellow across the aisle was eating his salad, had an entree on deck, and the waiter was asking him if he wanted dessert.
Eating out isn’t supposed to be a pressure situation. I like a liesurely evening out. If I want to inhale my food, I’ll make it at home and save money.
Who cares if I’ve worked in a restaurant? I’m talking about my experiences as a customer. It’s not my job to worry about what the restaurant staff thinks. It’s their job, literally, to worry about my preferences.
Yeah, but people who have worked in restraunts realize what is possible and what is not and why the things that happen happen. A server’s job is literally to get the food from the kitchen so that you don’t have to get up to get your meal. Hopefully they do a lot more than that, but they arn’t psychics or magicians. You are going to live a hard life if you spend it get indignant when people don’t perform to whatever arbitrary expectations you come up with when you make no attempt to communicate them and you don’t see the value in trying to understand the situation for yourself.
I have worked in restaurants, and you don’t need to be a psychic or a magician to realize that someone probably won’t want their entree immediately after their soup or salad - and especially if your restaurant has tiny little tables and huge dishes, as in the OP.
You must have worked at one of those very special little restaurants that has impeccable timing, never makes a mistake and has a psychic awareness of when each customer wants his entree.
And regardless of what you think. it was ignorant to blame the server. If you tell the server to wait on your entree, all the server is going to do is let your plate sit under a warming lamp for an extra 15 minutes. Kitchens do not have the magical ability to custom cook each entree acording to each customer’s arbitrary whim. Kitchens put the food out as quickly as they can and usually that’s not a problem.
My expectations are communicated, and are not arbitrary. I do not think it requires either psychic powers or magic to give someone 10 minutes to eat a goddamned salad before you plunk down a steak and ask them if they’re ready for dessert.
Again with the magic. And again with calling the diner’s preferences “arbitrary.” What the fuck do restaurants want? Customers to line up, get feed crammed into their mouths, have the money extracted from their wallets, and move on. Shut the fuck up, it’s asolutely necessary for the efficiency of restaurants that you keep your arbitrary little whimsical preferences, like where you want to sit and what and when you want to eat it, to yourselves.
Fortunately, few restaurants have the attitude you seem to have. I have often asked waiters to give me more time, and the only time I didn’t get it, the girl simply forgot I’d asked.
Correct. That is exactly what restaurants want. You should hear what they say about you in the kitchen.
I guarantee you that all the server does is leave your plate under the warmer. It gets prepared at the same time.
Please. I waited tables for a long time and I think it’s the servers problem. You also need to realize, there’s a difference between the entree arriving 5-10 minutes after the salad before the customer is finished, and arriving a minute and a half after the salad before it’s possible for anyone to have finished their salad. The former is forgivable and most likely not the servers fault. The latter is completely the servers fault and they need to take responsibility for it.
Does the server have control over when the food gets prepared?
I was a server for ages as well. The mistake in the OP was the servers, period. Because any good server wouldn’t bring out food that the customer was going to have to balance on their head because it wouldn’t fit on the table. Either they would tell the kitchen to slow down, or they would have the meal remade.
Thats why I sent my meal back that time - the server has total control as to when he or she brings the meal out to the table.
Sure you can have the kitchen remake it because it was made too fast–if you want the manager having an aneurism about the waste and taking it all out on you. The waste issue is a huge deal, because it cuts into the profit margin. The chain where I used to work had very strict limits about how many little packets of butter and/or jelly you could take with a bread basket, and woe be the server who took even one single extra packet out without a specific request from the customer. Seriously, it was the end of the fucking world if you took people an extra packet of jelly, because it was increasing overhead. Never mind the fact that if the packet didn’t get eaten, it would just go back into the bin and get taken to another table–it was still the end of the fucking world. Hell, I had a manager scream at me one time for cutting the rotten spots out of strawberries I was slicing up for a sauce. Didn’t I know how much a flat of strawberries cost?
So when shit like this happens, regardless of whose fault it is, the server’s got two options: piss off the customer, or piss off the manager. You have to deal with a pissy customer for maybe an hour out of one shift, but you have to deal with a pissy manager not only for the rest of the night, but all day tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. The customer can give you one crappy tip, but the manager can put you in crappy sections where you’re almost guaranteed to make crappy tips for the next three weeks if he’s so inclined, and a lot of them I’ve worked with are petty enough to do just exactly that. It sucks, but simple pragmatism dictates that the server keep the management happy at the expense of the occasional customer.
Give me a break, Diogenes. Plenty of restaurants manage to time courses correctly. In fact, it’s the norm. I’ve never worked in a restaurant, so I personally can’t say if it’s the kitchen or the server or the fookin’ maitre d’ who coordinates when courses come out, but I can say that most restaurants do a decent job of managing it. Any server who plunks down my entre when I’ve only taken 2 bites of my salad is simply not doing their job very well IMO, and I don’t care if it’s the kitchen’s fault or not. The server’s the one bringing it to the table and they’re the one getting the tip.
The server has a choice of bringing it to the table when it’s ready or leaving it under a warmer and getting yelled at for it.
You’re right that it’s usually not a problem but sometimes the entree gets done quickly. Suck it up. If you really can’t stand to have your entree on the same table as your salad then ask the server to keep your plate under the warmer, but the server has no control over when the food is actually cooked.
[QUOTE=EJsGirl]
Signs of a good server-
Watches for a sign but doesn’t hover.
Never brings a second course until the first is finished.
Never asks “how is everything” one second after you’ve put food in your mouth.
That’s one of my pet peeves! “How is everything??” “Mmmph, grlumph, glog good!” Servers that have that annoying habit must be waiting tables to finance their tuition for Dental school, as Dentists do that too.
Well, yes. They have control over when they put the order in. 9 times out of 10 (there’s always an exception somewhere) the server prepares the salad. I worked in a variety of resturants back in my serving days and this was always how it was done. There was nothing stopping us from making the salad (or grabbing it from the fridge depending on the resturant), taking it out and then putting in the order for the entree. No matter how quick your cook works, there’s no way they’re going to go from just recieving the order to having it ready to go in 3 minutes.
You said earlier that you could tell who here has worked in a resturant and who hasn’t. I’ve got to ask you now, have you ever worked in a resturant? Because you don’t seem to really know how they work.
Yes, a server could precisely time when they input an order. However, the order would only come out at precisely the right time when the server could
[ul]
[li]Calculate how many people in the entire restraunt are waiting for their food to be prepared[/li][li]Make some guesses about what sorts of food every other customer waiting for food is ordering and how long those items take to cook[/li][li]Know where in the kitchens’ que any large parties are[/li][li]Know how long it takes you to personally finish each course[/li][li]Hope that he or she’s not cleaning up someone’s spilled drinks, or running to refill the ranch dressing container, or making coffee, or carrying an order out to a large party when it’s time to input your meal[/li][/ul]
All while doing a job that is as frantic as a good game of whack-a-mole. I’d venture that 99% of the time, attempts to precisely manipulate when an order is sent to the kitchen will lead to your meal being late.