Oh god, I hate that! I, too, never get enough Parmesan cheese. Sometimes, I just opt not to have any at all because I really, really dislike people standing over me like that. Just leave me a little piece of the cheese! I’ll use my fork to grate it, if I have to.
Close. Five Easy Pieces, I think you meant.
:smack:
From IMDB:
"[Bobby wants plain toast, which isn’t on the menu]
Bobby: I’d like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.
Waitress: A #2, chicken salad sand. Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise, and a cup of coffee. Anything else?
Bobby: Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules.
Waitress: You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
Bobby: I want you to hold it between your knees. "
I just remembered a complaint I have (and I work in foodservice): Whatever happened to the good old days of grated carrots and red cabbage mixed with the lettuce in my salad? Nowadays, it’s always this godawful “spring mix”, which appears to be dandelion leaves and some purple stuff, along with a few other things I can’t identify. Half the time, you get more of this stuff on the plate than lettuce. Damn it, I want my salad made of crisp, fresh lettuce. I don’t care if its iceberg or romaine, I just want substantial, crisp chunks of lettuce that I can actually stick my fork into and deliver it to my mouth. Not these limp leaves of other … stuff … that become even more limp when doused with dressing and flatten themselves against the bottom of the plate when I try to stab them with my fork, forcing me to eat by scooping the stuff up, not skewering it.
Maybe your resistance to the bugs that live in animal poop had weakened. They aren’t inspecting that stuff anymore the way they used to.
I was very surprised to hear this suggested, although Google agrees. It does seem you need to go to a specialist restaurant in Japan, or one or two in Manhattan, to find it though. This doesn’t tally with MissGypsy’s description of being asked ‘how would you like your chicken cooked’ in a presumably more normal restaurant.
Fish and game, however, yeah. Not much point having duck breast or tuna steak if it’s not pink inside.
Now, see - this goes exactly against what folks said way back at the beginning. I said that I hate making special requests and exceptions, and folks chimed in with “just order it the way you need it”.
I’ve even had to order a “cheeseburger - hold the cheese” at some places that can’t seem to fathom why anyone would put a hamburger on the menu. That brings up - why do I have to pay for somebody else’s added dairy?
Sigh. Going upstairs to pack yet another brown-bag lunch.
Went on a hockey road trip with a girl who doesn’t really care for hamburger, but didn’t tell the driver that until we were inside a McDonalds. She - very confidently - marched up and requested two cheeseburgers “Poodle patty on the side” and got it.
I think it’s a combination between the Muzak and the crowd. If just the Muzak is too high, and no one else seems to be in there, then you can at least hear the rest of your party if you both speak loudly. And even crowded places are not too bad if there is no background music playing (but the only time I’ve experienced this at a “sports-bar” type place is an Outback, and it was sort of disconcerting at first because it seemed like no one else was in the place even though it was totally full.)
But when there is a crowd, and EVERYONE is talking over the Muzak to hear each other (then talking a little more to talk over the other people who are talking over the Muzak,) then it’s just intolerable.
Not having free refills on soft drinks is my biggest complaint. Especially if you have small children with you. The waitress will bring out the drinks right after you order your food, then the kids take about 2 minutes to suck it down while the food is being prepared. Finally when the food arrives you have to pay for another drink for the kid.
Getting all bent out of shape because there’s a piece of garlic bread or a pickle on the plate is childish. Kids seem to have a rule that no bit of food may be eaten as long as there is something on the plate that you don’t intend to eat. These people don’t seem to have grown up.
I expect a legible, itemized bill so I can be sure I’m not being overcharged. Bills that are not up to these standards leave me wondering if I’m getting screwed.
Smoking is also a biggie for me. Preferably no smoking is allowed. But if you have to have a smoking area, put some distance between smokers and non-smokers. Those no smoking signs on the table don’t prevent the smoke from the guy five feet away in the smoking zone from coming in my direction.
Easy, if you once ate mayonnaise that was six months past its expiration date and got violently sick from it.
I like aioli and most flavored mayonnaise-based sauces, but not plain mayonnaise or Miracle Whip.
Now that’s just weird. I hate crunchy vegetables in my salads, be they big hunks of iceberg lettuce, carrots, or what have you. I love spring mix salads- there’s no disgusting crunchy stuff in those.
Oh yes 
I love the cheese! I would much rather do it myself so I could blanket my dish with it. But it is a little embarrassing :o
Many of my complaints have already been addressed. I hate being seated by the restrooms becasue I hate the smell of any public bathroom. So if you are seated by them, then anytime someone goes in or out, the scent wafts by, blech.
I hate being seated next to any disruptive party and the restaurant mgmt. is too chickenshit to say anything to them. I don’t care if it’s some jerk on a cellphone or a screaming kid, ask them to quiet down. Your other patrons will thank you.
I must be missing something…what does “Poodle patty on the side” mean? I haven’t been in a McDonald’s in ages, but don’t they have non-hamburger items on their menu any more?
I don’t have any problem with the idea of requesting substitutions, but I hardly ever do it, as I can usually find something I like on the menu. The usual exception is when I don’t have a Lactaid with me and there’s something I really want to try that comes with cheese (I love cheese, and my recent development of lactose-intolerance is a real PITA). And there was the time that I was having dinner with a friend at one of our favorite restaurants, and when the waiter asked if we wanted any drinks she ordered a glass of sangria, then offhandedly said, “What I could use after today at work is a Long Island Iced Tea.” The waiter replied, “I can have the bartender fix you one if you want.” She said, sure, and now whenever we go there if we get that waiter he asks if she wants a Long Island Iced Tea.
That’s kind of strange, because I’ve generally found that both cooks and servers included are some of the most forgiving restaurant customers. Generally, I’ve found servers more forgiving and empathetic to one another knowing the bad days, politics, and crazy customer shit that we have all had to deal with. Servers in my experience also happen to be some of the best tippers.
I was a server and I can only think of one thing that I have ever sent back in a restaurant and that was undercooked chicken (It was nearly raw in the center and near the bone.) and I got very few, if any, special requests. I pretty much eat anything, and about the only “picky” thing I request is, when I order chicken wings, that they toss my wings in a mix of sweet barbecue wing sauce and the hottest wing sauce they have . Some places will do it, other places inexplicably will not… and if not, I can always get BBQ on the side, no big deal except sometimes they charge me for the thimble of BBQ wing sauce. But I guess that’s my only real restaurant complaint, that I can think of. I’ve tried to figure out the reason why BW3’s and some other places won’t toss my chicken wings with a combo of sauces and about the only thing I can figure out is that they want to preserve the flavor and integrity of their corporate sauce, or they don’t want to dirty an extra bowl.
I don’t remember seeing this yet-
My biggest pet peeve- when the bus boy is washing down the table right next to me with some chemically smelling spray (like windex). Smell is so closely linked to taste that the smell of windex will ruin the taste of the meal for me.
Bleh.
My peeve is close to that. Some restaurants, most of which are Friendly’s, smell like a school cafeteria. Not only did school cafeteria food not taste good, it partially didn’t taste good because of the stale-cleaning-fluid smell of the whole place…ack!
(Not to say ALL Friendly’s smell this way, but a large number do.)
I’m pretty sure that it was because she ingested way more fat that she was used to. I go between periods of cooking stuff at home with pretty low levels of fat to occasionally buying high-fat meals that make me feel nasty with the occasional diarrhea attack. I never intentionally cut back the fat so much that I was getting less than 20g/day of fat, but I still had the occasional “OMG, too much fat!” nastiness to deal with. Then again, I had a six month period where I just wasn’t eating much at all* that my body is still readjusting from.
[sub]*Nope, not anorexic, just poor at the time. [/sub]
I saw the end of Alton Brown’s cheese show last night and he said that most, if not all lactose is consumed by bacterial processes in a final cheese and that cheese is perfectly acceptable for the lactose intolerent. If that applies to American cheese or cheese products, I have no idea
My guess would be that at a place like BWW, they aren’t really tossing the wings to order but just pre-tossing big batches of wings for each sauce selection, putting them under a warmer somewhere and then a server or expediter sorts them into the baskets for individual orders. That would make a special order for mixed sauces a little more inconvenient – not impossible but maybe enough to disrupt the rhythm during a rush. Its possible they might not even have an extra bowl to mix sauces in. It’s also possible that they just don’t want to open the door for a backlog of special mixed-sauce orders in a line system which is engineered to crank out wings by the ton instead of to order.
I think a place like Appleby’s or something which is cooking wings to order and which would have more equipment in back (e.g. extra bowls) would have no problem with it. I once worked in a sports bar which did special wing orders like that. It was no big deal.
“Poodle patty” is the term we used to use for a hamburger served without a bun - old ladies would order them for their dogs back in pre-Adkins days.
She wanted a cheese sandwich, which is NOT on the menu and they get upset if you ask for one. However, if you order a plain cheeseburger with the meat on the side, they seem to be able to do that.