I was wondering which country has the best and/or worst service when it comes to restaurants. No fast food places, please.
I nominate Spain for “Best”.
In France, I had some Clarke Griswold moments when the snobbish waiters put on phony smiles and were insulting in French. When I let it go for a while, then spoke to them in French, they embarrassingly straightened up their act.
I vote France: “Worst”.
What made it exceptional?
Best: Ireland; very attentive and friendly.
Worst: Anyplace in the Carribean. They have the gratuity built into the price, thus there is little incentive for the waitstaff to give a rat’s behind. We had a waiter just walk away while talking our order! No explanation, no “excuse me”… nothing. Shmuck just walked away and was MIA for 10 minutes.
The best service I’ve had overall has been in the US. Of course, some of the worst I’ve had here, too. Germany has also been pleasant in terms of service. Efficient, attentive, not over bearing. The worst tends to be from former Communist Bloc countries. It’s getting better, and I probably shouldn’t lop them all together, but Hungary, especially, was infuriating to me. I lived there five years, and loved it, but customer service was not exactly embedded in the culture. One of my first weeks there, I went to a cafe, was seated, and after trying to flag down a couple servers, decided to see how long it would be before they noticed me on their own. Twenty-five minutes before someone came to get my order. And while it wasn’t like this everywhere, it was far from uncommon. Mostly, service would just be indifferent.
And it was similar in Slovakia, Poland, and Russia, but mostly my experience is with Hungary.
Define “best” service. I’m asking because my gf and I both love restaurant service in St Martin. It is relaxed/laid back to the extreme. Your check is brought to you when you request it.
I have heard people (Americans) in these restaurants complaining about “slow service”.
I saw the same thing in the Bahamas. We only got decent service when we found a restaurant that has American-style tipping.
Spain, overall, is home to the nicest most helpful folks I’ve ever met this side of Portland. The waitstaff I’ve encountered there reflect that. If they got stoned more often, they’d rival Portland, I’m sure.
Worst: Hungary. No contest.
I’ve been to Hungary several times, always tagging on a visit after the Sziget festival. We started calling it “Magyar Service”.
They could teach the French the meaning of the word condescending. They will be outright angry if you order something. We have been told to go away in proper restaurants: they flick their hands at you and say “fffft”, like “shoo”. They bring you the wrong thing, then dare you to say something. They will quite literally start a fight, and you won’t even know why. I’ve been laughed at twice, once for asking for something else because the food was so spicy it made my eyes water (and the menu didn’t say it was spicy at all) and once because I asked where the order of one of our party was when everyone else had had their food for a good 10 minutes. Laughed in my face & turned on their heel, without even saying a word.
I like Hungary. But Magyar Service is something special.
Hah! I totally believe it. (Well, the spicy part I find surprising, as I’ve never had anything I’d really consider spicy in my years there. Maybe the fish soup. Sometimes that’s got some heat.) But it’s interesting to see others have the same experience and it’s not just me getting overly critical of my adopted homeland.
I guess that’s why I was surprised it was spicy too. It was some sort of pizza-ish bready starter thing, with sausage. I think it was the sausage that was spicy.
I agree with you: the waiting was plentiful and the service normally indifferent. But sometimes it was just…special 
Slovakia and Poland can be similar, but I haven’t spent as much time there and it was never quite as bad.
It’s still a lovely place though. Beautiful country. Budapest is gorgeous, but I really liked Pecs. And with all those complaints I should also say that we always stay in the same hotel in Budapest just for the great service. The hotel is certainly nothing special, and actually kind of ugly, but the staff have always been very nice and they remember us. And they have great food! The breakfast rolled-up cinnamon bread thing… dreams off
You are, despite the service, lucky to live Hungary!
Cameroonian service isn’t bad, exactly. But it can be a little inexplicable.
Upon entering a restaurant, you will be given a menu, which is to be set to the side without a glance. The Cameroonian menu is many things. It’s a testament to the chef’s hopes and aspirations. It’s a document of what a proper restaurant would be expected to serve. It’s a vision into a world without shortage and hardship. But what it is not is a representation of what the restaurant has to serve you. For that, you must as “What is there to eat today?”
The waiter will offer you two or three options. If you are lucky, it will be some kind of “sauce” combination. You can have sauce and rice, sauce and fufu, sauce and plantains, or sauce and some kind of tuber. If you are less lucky, you will be offered “meat from the bush,” which encompasses everything from house cats to your favorite endangered species.
Ordering usually involves several rounds of “We don’t have any of that,” even for items you were just assured were the special for the day. Eventually, you and the waiter will settle on something that you both have confidence can be made into a reality,
Then the waiter will disappear. This may be for hours. If you ordered chicken, you may have to wait while the kill the chicken. You may wait while they run out and buy the chicken. Heck, you may be waiting while they wander the neighborhood asking the ladies if anyone has a chicken for sale. Someone may have to take a motorcycle to the next village over that isn’t having a current chicken shortage. Really, anything could be happening here. A typical wait is one hour. Two hours is not unheard of, even in nice restaurants. If you go out to eat, you just plan to be there for the duration. It’s an all day event.
After some time, if you are lucky you will get the food. Now, it may not be the food that you ordered, but it will be hopefully be something. Not infrequently, it’s only after hours of waiting that you discover that what you ordered isn’t actually available, and their whole plan was just not to serve you and hope you had forgotten. When you finally ask “Hey, is my chicken nearly done?” the waiter will helpfully volunteer “Oh, we do not have that,” and suggest something else.
After the food is consumed, you’ll eventually ask for the check. This check will reflect the writer’s fevered imagination, not what you actually ordered. You will then have a half hour argument about what you actually owe.
After spending a good chunk of the summer in Europe, I came to these opinions:
Worst: France, hands down, and Paris especially. I’ve never left a restaurant before completing dining before, but not just one, but twice, we deserted restaurants when the service was so damn awful. Disinterest, condescension, and long delays were rampant. Austria was a close second.
Best: Ireland, followed closely by the US. By and large, Ireland was full of nice, kind, talkative people who gave great service.
Some of the worst restaurant service I’ve had have been in the friendliest countries; specifically Canada and Thailand. Although the servers are pleasant, they also seem to be a bit distracted and unorganized.
Servers in Germany seem to have their shit together. In Morocco, high-end restaurants have all the professionalism of the French without the snottiness.
clap clap clap clap 
Sadly, I can attest to this. The level of restaurant service in Canada is nowhere near the level of service I’ve experienced in our culturally-close cousin, the USA.
Note that I’m speaking very broadly–in fact, some of the best service I’ve ever had has been at high-end Canadian restaurants–but I don’t go to those very often. For more mundane occasions, at a typical chain family restaurant (Boston Pizza, Swiss Chalet, Montana’s, and the like), the service is hit-and-miss. Sometimes, it is outstanding, sometimes it is adequate, and sometimes it is sub-par. It is nowhere near what I would consider to the the worst (for me, that would be France, like others have said), but there is certainly room for improvement in much Canadian service.
The best I’ve ever experienced would probably be the US. Always friendly, always attentive, always there when you need them and unobtrusive when they should be.
I wouldn’t say the service we got in Hungary was bad exactly (I mean, any worse than Romania or the Czech Republic, the other two countries we visited in the area.) But there was more “um are we doing this right?” there.
The only country I’ve been to where we really left the beaten path and ate like the natives and not in any sort of tourist manner is Mexico with my cousin who’s been living there for a few years. I was quite surprised that the service was very American there - never felt I had to chase down any waiters, I could always find somebody to tell me where the damned bathroom was, etc. Then again, I can’t imagine anybody looking more gringo than I do, so perhaps they saw a nice fat juicy American tip on legs when I walked in.
To be fair, the one thing I did enjoy about Hungarian restaurant service is that I never felt like I was being rushed out. If you’re in a hurry, that’s obviously a big minus, and sometimes getting the check requires the use of a flare gun, but you’re pretty much welcome to dawdle and linger for as long as you like without feeling the pressure of waitstaff trying to turn over tables.
I’m familiar with the concept of “island time,” and wouldn’t mind if people were just a little lackadaisical. I could, eventually, get used to the idea that islanders are laid-back and mellow and that a tourist should just have a drink and accept that food or service will come whenever they come, Mon.
But I have been to St. Martin, and my experience was that service personnel were far worse than slow- they were openly contemptuous. Ask someone to do his job, and you’ll get eye rolls and heavy sighs, as if he/she was having a wonderful day until this lousy paying customer came along. That was true for waiters and waitresses, for hotel staff, for casino staff…
St. Martin is the one and only place on Earth where you HOPE you get a French waiter! French and Dutch residents of St. Martin WERE friendly, mellow and laid back. It was the black islanders who were always surly and hostile. There was ONE plus side to that, however: any time you saw a black islander wearing a big smile, you could be almost certain he/she was about to give you a time share sales pitch, and could start running in the other direction!
There was one huge exception- when my girlfriend and I tried to rent a car, most service personel at most rental agencies were lazy, apathetic, scornful and of no help at all. But we finally got hold of someone who was EXTREMELY kind, friendly and helpful. He was so great that my girlfriend asked, “Are you from St. Martin?” He shook his head and said, “No, I’m from Haiti.”
Ah… that explained it.
St. Martin is a beautiful island with great beaches, and we had a great time. We didn’t get ANGRY at the awful service; after a while, we just learned to laugh at it. But on the whole, black service personnel on St. Martin’s make Korean shopkeepers look jolly by comparison.
Wow. My experience is totally opposite. Maybe because I’ve spent a week or two there every winter for the past decade.
We walk into a restaurant and the owner comes over to chat about what has happened since we saw him/her last. He gets out a picture of his new grandson, we tell him about how cold it is back home.
Then he seats us. If it is busy he asks what we’d like from the bar and maybe joins us for a drink. The waitperson comes by and we order appetizers and a bottle of wine. Service may be slow, but everything is cooked fresh. We linger over glasses of amaretto, then maybe an espresso. When we leave there are hugs and handshakes all around. If we arrive at eight, it is likely 10:30 when we leave.
Maybe it is the choice of restaurants? We’ve never been in a casino there, and the restaurants tend to be off the beaten path. **Yvette’s ** is a tiny place in the French Quarter that is part of the owner’s home. Most nights tourists and locals are split evenly.
In the US, many places bring your entree, ask if everything is OK, and give you your check all in one swoop.