This is pretty much what I was going to say. To be a friend egg it only has to follow one basic rule… “is it fried?”
How you want it fried is altogether different.
I can’t imagine getting upset over an egg though… at least not enough to vow to never return to a restaurant.
It wasn’t the egg that got the vow, it was the total response of the waitress and cook as if the customer was an idiot and didn’t know what he wanted. He clearly said he wanted a runny yolk. If a cook won’t give me the food the way I like, I won’t go back there, either.
^this^
I gave up after about 20 posts because this thread underscored my #1 egg-ordering rule: In a restaurant, never, ever try to get a fried egg the way you want it. Every cook thinks he or she knows exactly what all these terms mean but they seem to mean different things to different people. When I fry eggs at home – the only place I will eat a fried egg – I generally make them somewhere between over easy and over medium. I do not like snotty whites. The white must be cooked thoroughly or I find little egg loogies on my plate, which puts me off my eggs. No amount of toast or pancake will hide the loogy eggs. I love, however, to dip my toast (or pancake) in the yolks. So I want the yolks mostly runny, but maybe cooked hard just a little bit around the edges (to ensure minimum snottiness).
Try ordering that in a restaurant and getting what you ordered just right. Gah! I just order eggs scrambled; that’s a little more difficult to fuck up, but still possible. I’ll try for “scrambled dry,” but I don’t want crunchy eggs. That’s what the toast is for: to add the crunchy to the meal.
Good gad!
Yes, a little red flag should have gone up when no clarification was asked for.
But I usually make a point of ordering specifically what I want in the first place.
I do, too, but sometimes I wonder if my English is intelligible. (I am a native speaker of English.) There’s a local restaurant in town that makes awesome grouper tacos. The menu specifically states all the little extras that the tacos come with. In fact, straight from the menu:
Sounds good, right? Every. Single. Time. I try to order this, the order-taker asks me, “What do you want on them?” Well. I want everything the menu SAYS is on them. (Nevermind committing the unforgivable sin of mixing fish with cheese. Whatever. It’s delicious.) After three or four attempts where I get home (I always get take out to share little nibbles of grouper with my cat) and find that one or more of the items on the list I quoted above is not included, I finally start talking to the order takers about it.
“I really like the grouper tacos, but I have trouble sometimes getting everything that’s on the menu. How can I order this dish so that I get all the ingredients advertised?” I shouldn’t even have to ask this question. Either the cooks have no clue what’s on their damn menu, or the order-takers are not putting the items into the system correctly. I want to know what I can do to order in such a way that I actually get what the goddamn menu states I will get.
I’ve worked with several different order takers. One tried to enter each item individually as an extra side (no extra charges). I got home and no pico, no guac. Dammit. Another time, no chipotle sauce and no sour cream. I can’t understand it. The last time, I spelled it out. “Everything I’ve tried has failed. I have not *once *ordered these grouper tacos and gotten everything that’s on this list. How can we get this order right?” What I really want to know is why is it so goddamn difficult to serve what’s on the menu? I am not asking for anything extra, special, no substitutions. Straight off the menu. Why are they even asking me what I want on the tacos, when the menu clearly states what they come with? I should be able to point to “grouper tacos” on the menu and get just what it says. I shouldn’t have to open the to-go box to check for all the ingredients before I leave the place. I shouldn’t have to drive back because they left out the chipotle sauce and dry grouper tacos aren’t nearly as enjoyable. Sometimes they throw in extra stuff, like those awful pickled jalepeños, that I didn’t even ask for. The last time, the order taker promised me he’d follow my order through the kitchen and double check the to-go box before he handed it to me. I trusted him. When I got home, no pico. :smack:
I have lost my will to continue trying to order the grouper tacos. Short of sending an email to the owner, I am at a loss. I just quit eating there because the frustration isn’t worth the $3 worth of grouper they put into my tacos for $10. Does anyone think it’s worth it to write a note to the owner to explain to him why he’s lost my business? S’pose he cares?
I’m a bit confused, are you sure this isn’t a description of what comes on their regular tacos? It does say “seasoned meat” after all, which would imply to me that it is a description of their typical beef taco, not grouper. Usually, or at least, traditionally, fish tacos do not typically come with quite so many, nor these particular condiments… that is not to say that they can’t or don’t, it just seems more like a description of a beef taco.
I am sure. The restaurant allows you to choose whichever protein you want, so you could get beef, chicken, pork, or grouper (for an extra $1 of course). Here’s a link to the menu. Usually, there’s just one or two items on that list missing and it’s random, never the same item missing.
These are not your typical seafood restaurant or texmex restaurant kind of fish tacos. The place specializes in stir- and deep-frying stuff, you pick the veggies & accoutrements and there’s a few standardized dishes, of which the tacos are one. Also, their sauces are developed onsite and are usually very good, although they’ve recently dialed back the spicy in the chipotle sauce so I sometimes request the really hot one and mix half and half. Sometimes they manage to include my request and sometimes they don’t. I do have this problem with other standardized dishes but rarely to never with the customized ones (where I check off items from different lists: proteins, starches, veggies, sauces). I happen to like this dish, so I order it often and get very frustrated anticipating the marriage of flavors only to find out the guac wanted a divorce.
I find this commonly happening in a lot of places, even when you are crystal clear and specific with your order. You don’t always get every little thing you’ve asked for, especially if it’s a special request, but sometimes even when it’s not. It’s like there’s a disconnect between the conversation you had with the server/order taker and the conversation the server/order taker has in the kitchen. I can’t quite decide if it’s a listening issue, a training issue, a turnover issue, or maybe I don’t speak clear English as well as I would like to think I do.
Apologies for the hijack, but I think it’s actually relevant because I encounter similar problems trying to order eggs. It’s not just eggs.
Tell them you want the beef tacos, but please substitute fried grouper for $1 more. Maybe that’ll work? It’s right there on the menu- how annoying!
I’d be terrified to risk getting beef tacos with a side of grouper.
I’m glad I linked to the menu. It pisses me off so badly. I had to quit going there, like I said, because the rage was hard on my blood pressure.
Again, think there’s any point in contacting the owner to let him know he has a training issue, or something? It’s locally owned and the dude has three stores in town. Loss of my business probably won’t make much difference to him, but now that I’ve gone public on the internet… 
You’d end up getting beef tacos and groped!
Well, it’s not going to hurt you to send the owner a letter, and it might score you a coupon or something. Not that you want a free pair of grouper tacos that are still made incorrectly.
Yeah, I can see that if you point to the menu and say “make it like that” they should be able to accommodate you, and that they frequently get it wrong is a definite problem. Especially since it’s not consistently wrong. It would be one thing if they routinely left out the guacomole, because guac doesn’t belong with fish or something, but to have random things wrong is mystifying. “Just like on the menu” is pretty definitive. Heck, the waitress can hand the cook a menu while placing the order.
Depending on the server, that might be better. 
And here’s the clincher, not only can’t you get the condiments you want on your taco, chances are you probably aren’t even getting grouper on your taco. When I was down there, the big problem seemed to be that restaurants were advertising grouper but often the suppliers would be passing off all kinds of other fish as grouper… something like 70% or higher of all restaurants advertising grouper were actually serving some other fish. Don’t know if they have cleared the problem up some, but there’s only around a 30% chance you are actually getting grouper in your taco as well.
Same problem with red snapper. Or 22% of fish in general.
Ooh! Ooh! I read an article on NPR about that!
A bunch of fish eating wimps!
Peter Sagal is the worst of them. Carl Kasell could beat the snot out of him. 
Yep, Here’s a bit of an article that is much more informative and in-depth of the Florida Gulf problem.