My grandaughter and myself were in Turkey, we stopped at a cafe that advertised “Hot Beef Sandwiches” and ordered.
Sandwiches came and so did a few cats, I tore a piece of “beef” off and held it out to a cat, cat hissed at me, scratched my hand and buggered off with the speed of a thousand gazelles.
We never ate any part of those “beef” sandwiches and often wonder what the hell was in them
an aside…
When we were there, my wife and I had a stupid running game with the cats. At each of the towns, we would start playing a cat-spotting game…“Uno gato! Due gato!”. The one that could find each Cinque Gato of Cinque Terra won the game, with bonus props for petting it.
It was like playing real-life Zelda 
Back when I was in school in Toronto I’d just been dumped and I went to a favorite restaurant for some comfort food. The attractive waitress started playfully flirting with me for some reason (this doesn’t happen to me a lot, you should know) and I playfully flirted back. I could almost feel my dump-i-tude status lifting.
Then a drunken homeless dude crashed into the front window of the place and started screaming obscenities and making sexual comments about a woman who was at a table next to the window. That killed the mood in a hurry.
Not really a restaurant, but a friend and I stopped at a little stall in Seoul South Korea after walking a really long time. This particular stall had little bottles of juice set up on the counter, they usually sold for 100 won (about 14 cents). My friend grabbed one, drank it straight down and said, “How much”? Little old lady behind the counter said $5.00! He yells What?! She said, someimes 100 won, you drink first $5.00! you can’t put back, $5.00. Pretty sure she was having a joke, but he slapped 200 won down and took off.
Eating at a fairly nice restaurant in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Waiter brings the soup course, I take a spoonful, realize it wasn’t the kind of soup I ordered, so I call the waiter over and explain. He says “Oh, very sorry, it was for someone else”. He picks up the bowl, carries it across the room and sets it down in front of another diner.
Stopped in a Denny’s on the west side of Reading, PA one time (and one time only, given what happened). It’s about 7 in the PM and there are only three or four other patrons in the place. No one is around to greet me, so I sit at the counter. And wait. And wait some more. No one who actually seemed to work there was visible. I hear voices back in the kitchen, but that’s it.
After about ten minutes, I call out toward the kitchen door, saying “HELLO, ANYONE THERE?” The voices in the kitchen stop for a moment, then start up again. I wait a bit longer; nothing. Finally I get up and walk out. The other patrons were still sitting there, not showing any signs that they minded having no service at all. Weird.
A friend an I were trying out a new Cajun restaurant, and we ordered a couple of glasses of Cabernet.
The waitress brought an almost-empty bottle of the wine we ordered, along with a bottle of another brand. “This is the last of ABC Cab, we don’t have enough for two glasses. Can I recommend this XYZ Cab to you?”
We said sure, but were somewhat taken aback when she poured each of us 1/2 a glass of the ABC wine, then topped each glass off with the XYZ wine. :dubious:
Soooo… How many pizza places have you been to in Amerstam run by a turk who plays booty video’s for his customers? Seems pretty surreal to me without the added benefit of magic mushrooms.
These stories are great and vastly exceed my own paltry having-a-dropped-loaded-serving-tray-almost-take-my-head-off-at-The-Olive-Garden experience.
Yeah, that’s bad.
I was in a similar situation when I car was being towed, and I was riding shotgun as my car was being towed with a guy looking and talking very much like a nearly middle aged white southern tow truck driver. Playing soul-pop-rap on the radio. And who referred to race several times in his conversation with me, not always apropos-ly.
I was on a trip to Tanzania Africa, and was at a small restaurant in Iringa. Another group containing American travelers walked in, and we started chatting. Turns out the woman leading that other group lives next door to my uncle. In Ohio.
My husband and I went to a Pizzaria Uno once and ordered a deep dish pizza full knowing that it takes quite a while for a deep dish pizza to cook (there are even signs posted about for those unfamiliar with the process) and settled in for a long wait. (Not that long even…like 20 minutes.) The waiter came back with our drinks and promptly said “I’ll go check on your order.” We looked at each other and chuckled. Maybe 5 minutes later the waiter comes by and says “I’m so sorry for the delay, I’ll check with the kitchen and see what the hold up is.” What the hell? I’ve waited longer at Burger King! He immediately comes back and says “GASP you still don’t have your pizza? Do you want to speak to the manager?!?” We were so stunned we couldn’t say anything without bursting into laughter so he just interpreted it as rage I guess and ran off, lol. Moments later the manager was there apologising profusely for this terrible turn of events and I think we ended up getting free dessert out of it in the end. For absolutely no reason. 100% bizarre!
I was recruited for a job and the interview was held at lunch time at a local pub/restaurant. I was there nervously doing my interview and all of a sudden the front door burst open…
HO HO HO!!! MEEEEEEEEEEEERY CHRISTMAS!!! HO HO HO!!!
Santa had stopped by- I have no idea why. I mean, it was Christmas time but there was no event going on there or anything- he just sorta dropped in! And at first we both tried to pretend like there wasn’t a fat guy in a red suit HO HO HO!ing his way around the room, but eventually he stopped at the table and asked what we wanted for Christmas.
I told him a new job. Which I got.
Tee hee hee, there is always good clean fun to be had when native Arabic speakers write a menu in English. For one thing, the name of food that is virtually the national dish of Egypt (a fava bean stew) is pronounced “fool.”
So naturally, every restaurant from Alex to Luxor that caters to tourists proudly serves “FOUL.”
Also, there is no “p” in Arabic, so the letters P and B regularly get mixed up. Because of this, you can often order “leg of lamp” in Egyptian restaurants. Once I even had the option of “crap soup.”
My personal weirdest restaurant memory involves a German chain (I forget the name, but it was clearly a local kind of Denny’s) on a holiday. The restaurant was huge but deserted. There was literally no one there except for me, my husband, and one agitated and sorrowful waiter. I think he had to do everything himself - set up the table, cook the food, wait on us, and clean up. The entire time we were there he seemed to be biting his lip to hold back a torrent of weeping.
I’m pretty sure that the moment we left, he was engulfed in sobs.
Thought of another one.
I was having lunch with a friend a couple of years ago, and she ordered a burger. The young waitress brought it out, but it didn’t have any of the lettuce or tomato that normally comes with the burger. So my friend asked for lettuce and tomato.
The girl goes into the kitchen and comes out with a piece of lettuce in her hand with a tomato slice balanced on top. No plate or anything. My friend took it from her and used it, but we laughed about it the whole meal. I’m thinking some germophobes would have reacted differently.
Makes me wonder if they run that scam on purpose just to get you to order more drinks. 
I have two stories. When a group of friends and I were travelling in Morocco, we ate every day in this cafe across from our hostel in Fez. The owner became enamored of one friend, and made frequent, sincere, intense proposals of marriage to her. We kept eating there. It was really good food and she didn’t seem to mind!
The other story is more bizarre, in my opinion. My mother and I were staying in Madrid and we went out in search of dinner one night. We sat down at the cafe on the corner, but soon discovered that they had nothing on their menu! Disappointed and confused, we hopped one restaurant over. No food here either! Finally, we landed at a third restaurant on the same street. After inquiring about several items on the menu that they did not have, we said, well, what DO you have?! Potatoes and shrimp. So we had potatoes and shrimp and a giant bottle of wine and got totally drunk. It was awesome.
We were in Austria, at a small outdoor cafe, with a few tables inside as well. It was dinner time and the place was fully occupied with patrons, yet there was only one waiter servicing everyone. He sped around from table to table with ruthless efficiency. If he came to take your order and you hesitated just a bit, he’d walk away and move on to the next table. He didn’t even write anything down, and yet he amazingly got our orders right (once we finally managed to order something from him). He must’ve been some kind of robot.
A few years ago, my ex, our daughter and I went to dinner with his parents at a Chinese buffet in my ex’s hometown. We were seated in the back of the restaurant because that was where the biggest table was, and a waitress was sitting at a nearby table folding silverware into paper napkins. Suddenly, a couple burst into the restaurant. The husband stood by while the wife, in a rage, walked up to the waitress and began to yell at her in Chinese for a good five minutes. The waitress just sat there and took it until the other woman, her rage apparently spent, finally shut up and walked out with her husband. Needless to say, the incident left everyone in my party a bit unnerved, except for my daughter and nephew, who were toddlers at the time. Since none of us spoke Chinese, we could only sit there and wonder what the hell that was about. Was the waitress the husband’s mistress? Was the shouting woman the owner of the restaurant? We never did find out.
Those things are FAMOUS, and though I’ve never had one, I’ve heard they are quite awesome 
Aussiemo!!
(too obscure?)