What are your biggest restaurant complaints?

The BBQ Pit
81

[QUOTE=tdn]
Yeah, that was me last night. Most of my gripes in my OP come from one particular place, but normally I like it. I keep going back for a reason. Lats night, however, the place was particularly busy. I live in College Central, and this is parents’ weekend. It took me approximately 4 hours to get the check because my server was busy taking orders from tables of ten. Not her fault, of course, but damn that sucked.

Also no one’s fault, but I hate being seated in a high traffic area. This place has indoor and outdoor seating, and I was seated right next to the door. I don’t know how many people the outside part can accomodate, but from my impression, it must be approaching a million or so. It was like eating at a subway turnstyle at rush hour.
[/QUOTE]
Stephanie’s on Newbury?

If that’s not it, can I have another hint?

82

[QUOTE=Saintly Loser]
I threw something in a restaurant once. I’m not proud of it (abjectly ashamed would be a good description) and perhaps I was an unstable asshole at that time in my life. It was a long time ago, and I’ve worked, with a good deal of success, on my temper.

Here’s what happened:

I was in a kind of hip place (not the kind of place I usually go – it was chosen by friends). We were in the lounge. We might have been waiting for a table. I can’t remember.

I ordered a Bushmill’s on the rocks, and my two companions ordered whatever they were drinking. The waitress arrived with the drinks, put them on the table, and left. I tasted mine. It wasn’t Bushmill’s. It was Black Bush, the Bushmill’s premium whiskey, which I don’t particularly like.

I caught the waitress’s attention, and said something like “excuse me, this isn’t what I ordered. Sorry to be a pain, but could you bring me a Bushmill’s?”

She said (I swear it’s true. I’ll never forget this) “we’re out of Bushmill’s. That’s Black Bush. That’s what we have, and that’s what you’re going to drink.”

My glass went flying. Not at a person (I wasn’t that much of an unstable asshole), but across the room.

Needless to say, I was deservedly banned from that place for years to come.

OK, I was a jerk, but I could not believe the incredible rudeness of the waitress. And I’ve lived in New York all my life, and gone to any number of fashionable restaurants, where attitude and rudeness are the norm. This really took the cake, though.
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You fully state you were a jerk, so you get it. One has to wonder how she could keep a job as a waitress. I was a cocktail waitress giving out free drinks (Vegas) and I’d be fired for saying that, let alone a restaurant/bar CHARGING for drinks.

The difference here is that you’re not on here bragging about it. Litoris almost appears to be proud of her husband’s attitude problem.

83

[QUOTE=SnakesCatLady]
If someone asks for the ingredients in a dish, what is the problem with telling them?
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Chef’s secret?

That’s happened to me a few times. It wasn’t so much “I don’t eat olive paste, I’m allergic” as it was “This rocks! What’s in it besides carrots?” Be prepared for a guarded “Just carrots.”

matt_mcl, your story reminds me of something that happened last year. I took my ex to a restaurant that I remembered was excellent. They food was OK, and they were good with making a substitution for me, but after the food came the service dropped to almost nothing. No “How is everything?”, no “Can I get you something else?” Nothing. My water glass remained unfilled the entire time. I finished my soda, and wanted another. It took me about three days to flag down our waiter, because he just disappeared, or ignored me. I finally asked for another soda, and he said he’d bring it right away. It took 20 minutes. In fact, it arrived with the check.

And the funny thing? I got charged for the 2nd soda. $2.95 for something I didn;t even want anymore.

84

[QUOTE=matt_mcl]
Thirsty after a library interlude, I went into a restaurant and ordered a strawberry milkshake while I studied the article I needed for my assignment. The milkshake took like twenty minutes to come.
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Perhaps there were extenuating circumstances. She may have been back in the kitchen, struggling with her malfunctioning breast pump.

85

[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
Stephanie’s on Newbury?

If that’s not it, can I have another hint?
[/QUOTE]

Not Stephanie’s.

Hint: It’s in the town where every Doper lives, has lived, or will live.

86

[QUOTE=featherlou]
I dunno; I get pretty pissy with myself when I serve myself something I didn’t want…

You’d be surprised how your tolerance levels for unbelievable incompetence go up when you live in a city that has restaurants/fast food joints closed occasionally due to staff shortages - we’ve seen a Burger King closed on a Saturday afternoon, for example. It takes A LOT of incompetence to get our attention these days - they pretty much have to spit in our food in front of us before we’ll stop going to a particular place, because they’re all the same here. We just reflect the service/food quality in the tip - we’re routinely tipping around 10% or less these days. (It’s not the server’s fault that they are short-staffed, but it’s not ours, either.)
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I thought Canadians didn’t tip. How does one figure a 13.5% tip?

87

My biggest restaurant complaint would be patrons who use their eating disorders to give grief to the staff. And I haven’t been a server since 1983.

88

Yeah! How dare all you people with your lactose intolerance and your food allergies and whatnot expect restaurants to cater to your demands. The pure unmitigated gall. Eat at home like the wretched slime you truly are.
(Carol, what if we’re just picky? Can we give the staff grief then? Cause I’m not a fan of the onions.)

89

[QUOTE=denquixote]
I thought Canadians didn’t tip. How does one figure a 13.5% tip?
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I don’t get the joke here. We and everyone else we know normally tip 15% plus for good service. :confused:

I’ve thought of another peeve of mine - when you’re ordering your dinner, and the server says something like, “Would you like the caesar salad with that?”, in such a way that implies it’s one of the choices that comes with your meal, then when you get the bill, you see that the caesar salad is an extra $3. When they upsell me, I’ve started asking if it’s extra or not.

90

I hate how some restaurants put a certain seasoning in EVERY main dish. Lately it’s been black pepper. Everything comes preseasoned, and there’s enough pepper in one dish to make an elephant sneeze. I’m not allergic to pepper, but I have IBS (yes, my doc diagnosed it) and eating too much of it in one sitting will cause my digestive system to rebel. I’ve had to consult with the servers and the cooks sometimes, only to find out that there’s not a single main dish on the menu that I could safely eat.

91

[QUOTE=featherlou]
You’d be surprised how your tolerance levels for unbelievable incompetence go up when you live in a city that has restaurants/fast food joints closed occasionally due to staff shortages - we’ve seen a Burger King closed on a Saturday afternoon, for example. It takes A LOT of incompetence to get our attention these days - they pretty much have to spit in our food in front of us before we’ll stop going to a particular place, because they’re all the same here. We just reflect the service/food quality in the tip - we’re routinely tipping around 10% or less these days. (It’s not the server’s fault that they are short-staffed, but it’s not ours, either.)
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My pet peeve is when I order my steak medium rare and I get well done.

It’s happened to me 3 seperate times in the last few months, and at least one of those was a nicer place that I usually go, not just a family dining type. (The waitress was nice and apologetic and went to get me a new steak but I still got one cooked more than what I liked. It was closer, so I ate it because I was starving by then and my friends were almost done.)

92

[QUOTE=Lynn Bodoni]
I hate how some restaurants put a certain seasoning in EVERY main dish. Lately it’s been black pepper. Everything comes preseasoned, and there’s enough pepper in one dish to make an elephant sneeze. I’m not allergic to pepper, but I have IBS (yes, my doc diagnosed it) and eating too much of it in one sitting will cause my digestive system to rebel. I’ve had to consult with the servers and the cooks sometimes, only to find out that there’s not a single main dish on the menu that I could safely eat.
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Wait’ll they get ahold of Bacon Salt. :smiley:

93

[QUOTE=PunditLisa]
General restaurant complaints:

a) HUUUUGE portion sizes. American is the fattest nation in the world. Serving a 6,000 calorie meal isn’t helping. Pare it back, folks.

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No, here I disagree strongly. Look, I don’t eat out often, so it’s a treat (exception, I have salad bar for lunch very often, but there I pay for it by the pound). So I’d like large portions, as I look forward to it, and dont eat a lot that day- other than the big meal. Sometimes I take leftovers home, too. The cost of the food is a small part of what you pay- a steak that is 3oz more and a bigger tater adds less than a dollar to the price (overhead and wages are big cost factors).

You can eat less, ask for a smaller portion, order a smaller portion, or take it home. But when I am served a 3oz cut of meat with three strands of veggies artfully draped across it, and a sauce drizzled acroos the whole plate in an artistic manner; all for $30- I have been ripped off. And leave hungry.

I eat light and more healthy at home. When I go out, I want to indulge myself.

94

I keep kosher, but will eat vegetarian or kosher fish dishes in non-kosher restaurants. This is what Mr. Neville and I always do. No server has ever given us any kind of grief over this.

It could also cause a problem for someone who was sensitive to sulfites. Or it could make a dish non-kosher (though I would be surprised if someone who drank only kosher wines were to eat anything cooked in a non-kosher restaurant) or non-halal- nothing cooked with alcohol can be halal.

95

My biggest complaint about restaurants is the surprisingly poor quality of their food. Now if you go to an upscale (non-chain) steakhouse that specializes in select prime cuts of aged beef, you’ll probably get a pretty good steak. And if you go to a (non-chain) seafood restaurant that has never-frozen seafood, you’ll probably get pretty good seafood. But for anywhere else the quality is a total crapshoot, not just between chains but even individual restaurants of the same chain. I’ve found mom & pop three-table places that had wonderful food. And I’ve gone to places where dinner for two with drinks will set you back $100.00 and the food was terrible.

On my last birthday my wife treated me out to eat and I ordered what the menu called prime rib-eye for $20.00 a serving. After watching me chew the same bite of meat for a full minute she asked me what was wrong. I offered her a cut of my steak and when she tasted it she became so incensed that she called the waiter over and demanded I be given a different steak. So I ordered a different steak and what I got was about the same quality steak as you get with a steak & eggs breakfast: a piece of beef (evidently from a steer that was beaten with a wire whip every day of it’s life) that was marinated and run through a macerator in a valiant attempt to make it humanly edible. I’m not that great a cook and I can do better at home.

My only other complaint is the scarcity of bread in so many places. No, I do not want “cheesy” anything, I don’t prefer garlic bread, I don’t want a whole-grain loaf the size of a large dinner roll with sawdust sprinkles on top. I want BREAD. Whole or sliced, loaf or rolls; hell, I’ll even take breadsticks or pita slices if they’re fresh. But give me B-R-E-A-D.

96

Damn, I’ve had several annoying experiences in restaurants lately, most recently Friday night and I’m much relieved to see a thread where I can bitch about them.

My problem is the opposite of Litoris’: I drink a LOT when I eat and I really don’t care to eat unless I have water to wash down the food. For some reason, I just cannot seem to get servers to bring me a glass (or a bottle - I don’t care) of water. I’ll pay extra for it if I have to, I just want water with my meal. Last Saturday I asked three times before I got a glass of water. I only had to ask once for the beer and the BLT, but getting the water required me to ultimately get up from the table and go to the bar and get a glass of water from the bartender. The server had disappeared after my second request for water and never did return to our table.

Fast forward to this weekend and a different restaurant . . . when the server welcomed us and asked if she could get us anything to drink, I ordered a glass of wine and a glass of water. Got the wine - excellent. As she serves the wine, she asks if we’re ready to order appetizers. We are, and we do, and I again ask if I can get the water when she comes back to the table. Oh sure, she says. A few minutes later, here are the appetizers, but no water. Once again, I ask if I can please have a glass of water. Oh sure, she says. My husband asks for crushed red peppers too. She returns promptly with the peppers, but no water. Now I’m a bit annoyed and confused, we’ve received plenty of attention from the servers and have received everything we ordered promptly and as we ordered it with the only exception being the bleeping glass of bleeping tap water. Why? What is the deal back there in the kitchen/prep area that apparently allows servers to fulfill orders perfectly while making it really difficult to get a glass of water for a customer?

If this didn’t happen so often, I’d just assume that I’m drawing not-so-good servers, but since it happens in all kinds of restaurants with all kinds of servers, including servers that are practically flawless with everything else, there must be something else going on. I realize that usually restaurants don’t charge for water so they may not be motivated to serve stuff they’re not making money on, but hell, they don’t charge extra for crushed red peppers either. I also understand that restaurants simply cannot (and shouldn’t be expected to) cater to really weird food requirements/preferences, but really, is this request that weird? I don’t ask for anything special, just a glass of water. I don’t need a lemon slice or even ice, just some water. In a glass of any shape or type, plastic or glass.

The thing is, this happens so often that I’m seriously considering just bringing my own bottle of water with me to save the annoyance, but I hate to look like a big dork/crank.

Oh, and I should mention that I try very hard to be a good customer - I am pleasant to the servers, I make eye contact with them and smile, I say please and thank you, and I tip well. So I don’t think this is some giant worldwide vendetta against Dr. Woo and her water fetish; I’m just at a loss as to why this is such a problem.

97

I welcome this topic. Great replies thus far.

My biggest complaints, in no particular order:

  1. Stupid-crap management which allows other diners to ruin the meal for every one else by continuously using those #%@##@ TOOTLE-BEEP walkie-talkie phones. I can tolerate cell phone conversations just fine, but when I keep hearing that freaking TOOTLE-BEEP at the end of every sentence, and then have to hear THE FUCKING REPLY coming over the dumb asses cell phone, amplified, it drives me bug-fuck. I can understand that there are some people out there who are too stupid to live, but I consider it the job of the restaurant manager to put a stop to this, real quick. It so pisses me off that to this day I will not eat at a Bonefish, a really pretty good restaurant chain, because of one such incident. Again, this is a rant against the management.
  2. Stupid-crap management which allows patrons to get by with letting their little darling kids run rampant around the store, disturbing all the other diners. Yeah, the parents are absolute tools, but again, it is the management that should be putting a stop this. I once read a restaurant review about a local restaurant that frankly did not get very high scores for their all-you-can-eat buffet, but got high praise indeed when a family of children from Hell was politely told to leave as their little darlings were disrupting the other patrons. Hurrah for the management!!! I put that one on my list for being a place where I could at least eat decent food uninterrupted.
  3. Servers who don’t bring the check in a decent amount of time. Fortunately, I have discovered the trick to this which usually works (not always.) When you’re done, and there’s no check, get up and go to the register to pay. Your guest check? None given by server. They usually find it pretty quick. It’s a bigger hassle when the server is the one you pay, but I’ve found that if you go to the hostess station and say “We want to pay and leave, but no server,” they usually find her/him and get the bill. My one exception was an Applebys near St. Louis. As someone mentioned above, they couldn’t ring up & charge the sale, no other servers could, and it took forever to find either the manager or my server to get the check. I stewed and stewed. Finally I got it, paid, and in the “Tip:” column, wrote a big “ZERO” just so they would have no problem getting the message. That Applebys was right byt he hotel I was staying in, but I never went back there, although I do patronize others in the chain…the diff being server (local) problem vs. management (chain) problem.

Thanks, I feel a lot better now.

(Just for the record, before finishing college, I was a Sambo’s restaurant manager for a little over a year. I don’t know if this makes me a better or worse restaurant customer, but everyone says I over-tip the wait staff. I feel that I don’t tip enough, and have on occasion left a tip equal to the cost of the meal for exceptional service, especially in the more inexpensive places, like Denny’s, Waffle House, etc.)

98

[QUOTE=Inner Stickler]
Yeah! How dare all you people with your lactose intolerance and your food allergies and whatnot expect restaurants to cater to your demands. The pure unmitigated gall. Eat at home like the wretched slime you truly are.
(Carol, what if we’re just picky? Can we give the staff grief then? Cause I’m not a fan of the onions.)
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There’s a difference between lactose intolerance and self-imposed, almost delusional claims like “chicken broth in the dish made me throw up”. That is an eating disorder, not an allergy.

99

Why can’t chicken broth make one throw up?

100

[QUOTE=Carol Stream]
There’s a difference between lactose intolerance and self-imposed, almost delusional claims like “chicken broth in the dish made me throw up”. That is an eating disorder, not an allergy.
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It’s not an eating disorder. It’s a lack of sufficient enzymes to digest meat-based proteins, caused by many years of not using them due to eating vegetarian, or that was how it was explained to me. And I don’t give grief to staff about their selections (or lack thereof) that are sufficient for vegetarians - I just don’t fucking eat there if there’s nothing veg that can be ordered off the menu. Frankly, inlaws with that attitude have caused me more trouble than a restaurant ever has.