I understand that you come into the restaurant very hungry. Thats fine, glad to hear it, and glad to give you all the food you want; as long as you remember that I am just one person. Also, before you think that you and your family are the most important thing in the world, look around you and see how many other people I have to deal with.
If you have a snipy attitude, please leave it at home, because I do not appreciate it. You are not at McDonalds, please do not expect the food to come out in that time, it is NOT readymade, someone has to make it for you.
If you don’t like a certain type of food, please let me know, that way the cooks won’t put it in your food, and you don’t have to wait around for a new one, and I don’t have to hear you bitch.
Just because I don’t smile at you or spend a lot of time near you, does not mean that I am rude there are other people that need my attention too.
Deserts are usually prepared by someone. It is not our practice to keep them ready on a plate in the freezer in the off chance you might want one. Therefore, it make take five minutes or more to get the desert, especially if you are a large party and are ordering multiple deserts.
If you got your food, always had enough to drink, condiments, and your check was correct (especially when you had a really large party, and everyone wanted seperate checks and everyone on your check didn’t even sit together!) then you probably had good service. It is not my fault that you chose to come with such a large party and that I cannot make deserts appear by snapping my fingers. So please leave a tip. It is the curtious thing to do.
I’ve waited tables, too, and I can certainly identify with many of your complaints. But part of being a good server is being friendly and accessible. Or at least faking it.
south333, I couldn’t do what you do. If I was lucky I’d be fired, if not, I’d probably be arrested.
I do something similar, though. I feed the artists at a theatre. This means I spend days planning, shopping, and preparing food. I try to have a table full of a variety of food and beverages before they walk in the door, and I keep the food and drinks coming all night. I’m usually too busy to see their show.
I do this with a fairly tight budget, and as a volunteer.
To some of the artists who come to my theatre (and I’m sure some of this applies to restaurants, too):
Please do not see if you can fling trash into places where it’s never been before. First of all, you can’t; it’s been everywhere, including on the ceiling and on top of the door. Second, after a 10 hour day of preparing food for you, I’m the one who gets to clean up your “artwork”.
If you choose to trash the place anyway, don’t be surprised if you come back next year to find an empty green room.
We’re happy to accomodate special requests. I’ve delivered everything from appliances and hardware and guitar strings to pycnogenol. I’ve driven for miles to try to find unusual items which were requested. Hell, I’ve spent hours calling around to try to figure out what some of those items were. But fer cryin’ out loud, don’t show up an hour before you go on and expect me to whip up a dairy-free, sugar-free, salt-free, fat-free taste-free dinner for you. We’re a theatre, not a restaurant (believe it or not) and I can only prepare what I’ve brought. Tell me in advance, please.
I won’t have to relay your message to the chef. You just told her. I’m sorry you think the coffee fucking sucks. Perhaps if you had told me what was wrong with the coffee, I might have been able to make a fresh pot and fix the problem. Since it’s apparently beyond hope, however, the solution would seem to be to take the coffee pot and let you drink water. Oh, and if you’re looking for me I’ll be unavailable. Have a nice night.
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Two very important rules I live by:
Never mess with a volunteer.
Never, ever piss off someone who handles your food.
QUOTE FROM south333:
-If you don’t like a certain type of food, please let me know, that way the cooks won’t put it in your food, and you don’t have to wait around for a new one, -
I do have a problem with this statement though. Unfortunately, I will read a menu and never see one word about any **onions[b/] being in the dish I’m ordering (because the menu never spelled it out for me)–then the dish is laid out in front of me loaded with onions and I just can’t enjoy it. Now, none of this is your fault, but to avoid these situations try letting said restaurant goers know what the menu does’nt. I for one would appreciate it.
hoss, I can’t quite agree with that one. If all waitresses and waiters ran every recipe past every customer after they placed their order, it would not only take a great deal of time, but they’d have to deal with some (justifiably) annoyed customers. “Yes, I already told you I wanted a turkey club. Of course I know there’s bacon in it, why do you think I want it?”
If there’s a food in particular that I don’t like or can’t eat, I’ll ask before ordering. “Can you tell me if there are green peppers in your hash browns, please?” (There are some diners which do that. Go figure.) I don’t expect them to know by osmosis that I don’t like green peppers in hash browns.
And onions are not exactly an uncommon food. If I didn’t like them, I’d assume that everything comes with onions and order accordingly. How about “I can’t eat onions. Can you recommend a dish without onions? I was thinking about chicken tonight.”
This reminds me of a time I order Prime Rib at a certain newly-opened Aussie-themed steak joint in a small south-Atlanta suburb in Georgia. The server paused after taking the order and said to me,
“Prime Rib comes pink.”
I stared blankly at first, then raised an eyebrow and gave a slightly quizzical look.
“It’s slow cooked, so it doesn’t change color,” he added. “It doesn’t mean it raw because it’s pink.”
After it sank in what he was saying I told him that I understood how Prime Rib is cooked and that is why I ordered it. Besides, I’m from Texas I know how steak is cooked. Ever notice how Texans always work that into the conversation?
“Ok,” he said laughingly. “But I always tell people because we’ve had several people complain about it.”
I thought he was joking, but a few months later my (ex-)wife’s company served Prime Rib at their Christmas dinner. Several of the rubes at the company complained later that the meat was served “raw”. “It was still Pink!”
I’m always amused when retail people or waitresses tell me something that is obvious to me. I don’t get angry though. I remember when I went to rent Life is Beautiful, the clerk said, “You realize this is subtitled, right?” I just laughed and said, “Um, yeah. Thanks.”
At a vegetarian restaurant recently, the waitress said, “You know this comes with tofu, right?” I guess I didn’t look granola-y enough to have known that…even though the menu plainly stated it. I didn’t mind the question though. I thought it was nice of her.
I think it’s best to notify someone of thing’s that they may not know beforehand. If you do this they think you’re treating them like they’re stupid, and they may be insulted, but when they leave they’ll either think they’re smarter than you or they’ll be glad you told them so they didn’t make a fool of themselves.
On the other hand, if you don’t tell them and they don’t know, they’ll either feel stupid, complain and look stupid, and either way not like you for not telling them because they don’t want to feel stupid.
So if you want a good tip, tell in advance unless it takes too much time.
Umm . . . if you know onions (for example) aren’t your bag, why can’t you ask the server yourself? Homebrew, I sympathize. I eat my prime mooing, and it freaks out the servers. The last time I asked for rare prime rib, it came back medium–about as pink as a rare steak would be. She was actually miffed at me when I mentioned it, even though I ate it and enjoyed it. But she was probably just having a bad day.
I always consider it to be my responsibility to ask the server, barring certain obvious exceptions. Example: I am ordering soup, I will always ask if there is meat (many soups labeled ‘vegetable’ often are chicken or beef based). Fine and dandy. I am ordering something called “vegetarian”, then I expect there to be no meat. If I am not sure, I will occasionally ask what the ingredients are, exactly. (Meat is hiding in a lot of things out there!)
I’ve never really had problems when I managed to explain myself, except once, where a waitress at Applebee’s took my order of “quesadillas with no meat” (I even mentioned I was vegetarian) to mean “no chicken, but include bacon”. When I asked for a new one because it wasn’t what I ordered, she at first refused, because “it has no meat”. When I explained that bacon was certainly meat, she said that she thought I had meant no chicken. I wondered why she thought a vegetarian would want bacon, though.
Not tipping is extremely crude unless the server has been extremely rude. Not having food instantly for a large party far from qualifies. I’m sorry you had to serve such boors, south333.
(I even tipped the above waitress – though not as much as I normally would have – even though she was very rude about the whole situation and blamed me for the problem. Mistakes are fine – I get them all the time, especially because of the unfortunate similarity between words like “beef” and “bean” – but at least get me new food. Don’t ask me to pick meat out of my food. That does not make me happy.)
I think a fair rule of courtesy is to treat the server like you would any other thinking, feeling human being. At least, I’ve never had a problem with that rule!
Along the lines of Homebrew’s story… I used to work in a restaurant that served seared ahi tuna. OK, maybe you guys aren’t familiar with the dish, but it’s very common in the part of the world where this restaurant was located. Anyway, shouldn’t you know that “seared” means lightly cooked around the edges? I was told to tell the customers that it came that way, which I thought was ridiculous, but it turned out that 90% of them either ordered something else or asked for it well done. I’m surprised the chef was willing to do it.
Hey, isn’t the tip included for large parties where you work?
I’m usually a decent tipper, that is I never tip less than fifteen percent and usually twenty, and I base it on the total after the tax. But on one occasion, I was in a restaurant that was not busy, and I ordered something simple (I was driving on vacation and a heavy meal makes me drowsy). I was in a good mood and smiling when I went into the restaurant. The waitress, however, was not. She was surly and scowling from the moment I sat down. She was slow and unattentive, and practically threw the food on the table. She really brought me down. I didn’t say anything to her, and I did tip her…but it was only one penny. I thought that if I didn’t leave anything at all she would just think I was a cheap bastard, but that a single cent might convey the message that the problem was her attitude. It probably did no good, but I still think it was the right thing to do. A smile would have made the difference between a single cent and a real tip.
Conversely, there was the time I was very depressed when I walked into a diner. I sat down at a two-person booth (the counter was in the smoking section,) and ordered coffee.
I was there for more than a couple of hours. The waitress kept the coffee and the really bad jokes coming, and she had me laughing in about an hour. She finally cheered me up to the point where I could actually eat something light.
When I left, I left a 200% tip. (My bill was small.) That waitress knew why she got that tip, and I never had to tell her.