Things You Didn't Know Make You an Asshole at Restaurants, Part 2

Before we dive into the fresh list of unwitting offenses, there's one point on lounging I somehow forgot to touch on in Part 1, probably the most annoying one of all.  People who come in, order the absolute cheapest thing on the menu, then use it as an excuse to hang out for hours, as if I don't know what they are doing.  It's called loitering, and it's actually against the law.  Remember how I said a restaurant is a place of business, operated for the purpose of profit?  Well, if you don't want to spend money, get the hell out, simple as that.  It actually astounds me that it's not just the expected pack of pierced-faced, parent-leaching teenagers who do this; full-grown, ostensibly-employed adults pull this shit regularly, during mealtime rushes, no less.

This is you, only not as cool or amusing.  And I hate you.

Need a place to ooh and aww at those new vacation and baby photos?  (Nobody cares, by the way.)  Want somewhere to catch up with your old college roommate?  Looking for a venue for a three-hour Bible study, then a discussion of your upcoming mission trip and how you "just know this was Jesus telling you what to do"?  Here's an idea: go to your house.  Stop taking up one of my tables, unless you want to start paying hourly rent on it like a hooker-friendly motel.  (Sorry, but I seem to encounter these oblivious, starry-eyed, platitude-spewing, preachy types both in and outside work with nigh miraculous frequency, and they are invariably cheap to boot.)

Moving on . . .

Coming in late

Almost everyone pays lip-service to being sorry for this one, yet it stops perhaps .1% of them from doing it anyway.  The last hour that a restaurant is open is not for new customers.  It is to give the people who were already there a chance to eat in peace.  Toward the end of the night, when business begins to dwindle, restaurant staff start the long process of closing the building: putting away equipment and food, cleaning up, polishing the table you let your infant eat directly off of (gross, we don't sanitize those, FYI), etc.  Pretty much the most thankless part of the job, except all the other parts.

It's not as sexy as it sounds, and leads to impromptu fornication less than 50% of the time, despite what pornos would have you believe.

This is especially true of the kitchen.  You know, the place where that five-layer burger you just had to order at fifteen minutes till close comes from.  Shutting down a commercial full-service kitchen - where food is stored in different freezers overnight, the deep-fryers have to be scoured, and enough pans, utensils, and assorted metal implements to armor a platoon of Robocops need washing - takes a certified Long-Ass Time.  Trust me, I've worked both sides of a restaurant.

Just your average cleanup job.

Enter your stupid ass, sauntering in half an hour before lockdown, aviator shades perched backward on your wood-glued fauxhawk two hours after sundown, looking for a three-course meal.  Basically, the close all but grinds to a halt for you.  Not only that, but a good portion of it is actually undone.  Would you like it if someone came into your cubicle at 4:15 and said, "Yeah . . . I'm just going to go ahead and delete your last hour's worth of work and hand you six new TPS reports to process, mmkay?  And if you need to stay after close, you go right ahead, we'll just cut your pay to $3.00 for that hour, all right?"  Can you see how this would be irritating, even downright nerve-grating?  Maybe even make some people food-tamperingly pissed off?  Think about it the next time you decide a MexiMelt or Encharito just isn't good enough for you.  Ever notice casual dining doesn't advertise "4th Meal"?  There's a reason for that.

And, for the love of Wolfgang Puck, if you have the gall to come in and order a meal in the final hour, tell your server everything you want upfront.  Forgot you like olive relish with your sandwich?  Tough shit, Needy McBitch-a-Lot.  You're going without it tonight.  I cannot count the number of times I have been sent back to the kitchen by the same clueless guest multiple times to face the wrath of a cook because s/he needed two more ranch dressings, which has by now been moved back to the cooler in the rearmost part of the building, probably beyond the Chasm of Certain Doom and a churlish guardian dragon.

"So you are on a quest for honey mustard?  First, you must answer me these riddles three!"

While we're on the subject, let me clue you in on a little secret: you never need two more fucking ranch dressings.  Each of those teensy little harmless cups conceals approximately 170 calories and 18 grams of fat.  That's because it is concocted from straight buttermilk, mayonnaise, concentrated cream-of-death, and Satan's zesty ejaculate.  Do your screaming arteries a favor and forego the second dousing on your 10-ounce side salad.  To quote my boss, "Your food is not a vessel for ranch."

Fuck this country.

Using coupons/gift cards/certificates

Who doesn't like to save a buck?  In these hard economic times, with a family to feed blah-blah-blah (*insert obligatory recession-acknowledging bullshit opener from every article about penny-pinching and corner-cutting written in the last decade*).  You know what?  I'm one of those people suffering, too.  So just because you got a meal for free with the purchase of another, after you argued with me for ten minutes about using two coupons and combining them with another in-store special even though every goddamn coupon on the planet has the same stipulatory fine print that reads Cannot be combined with any other coupon, discount, promotion, or special offer, does not mean you are excused from tipping on that other meal.  I have said this before, but it bears repeating: you tip on the original bill, not the adjusted one.

Please take one!

It has actually reached the sick point where I loath using coupons myself when I go out, since I am disgusted by association. I fear that every employee in a building is looking to shank my tires and/or kidneys the moment I pull out a crinkled clipping from my weekly circular, because that's more or less the involuntary impulse I get.  Which is one more reason I never mention where I serve on this blog.  While that may say more about my mental stability than anything else, it's also a testament to how often servers get royally screwed by the Couponistas.  (*Insert your preferred cheap ethnic stereotype joke here*)

As for those darling media-cunts Rachel Ray and Oprah Winfrey who have both condoned lousy tipping in general as a perfectly acceptable way to save money . . . I'm sorry, I just had to shunt an aneurysm in my brain with a box-cutter and a silly-straw.  That's because I cannot afford medical insurance on your shitty tips, Mrs. Extreme-Couponer.

Um, what was I saying?  Oh, yeah, fuck this woman.  But not like that.  Seriously, I just had to include this picture I stumbled on, because I think it says something disturbing about America, suggesting a latent Freudian sexual-culinary urge to bang TV cooks.  Or something.

Modifying food or requesting non-existent items

Do you remember when waitresses in pastel skirts and paper hats took your order on a little notepad, hung it on the old-fashioned ticket wheel, and retrieved your food half an hour later from the open-windowed kitchen?  And you could get fountain Cokes flavored with vanilla or cherry syrup while taking your best gal out after the football game, where you gave her your letterman sweater?  No?  Maybe it's because that was so six decades ago.

It may have escaped your notice, but eateries have changed a tad in the interim, especially massive chains.  We now have these fancy machines called "computers" that we use to ring in your order, and they are not word-processors.  Your sever doesn't just type in exactly what you want letter-for-letter.  In order to simplify, streamline, regularize, and otherwise expedite your restaurant-going experience, which is the express goal of casual dining, the company designs and installs a program with the specific items from the menu each represented by a single icon on a touchscreen.

Think of it like your iPad, except less pretentious and even more prone to bizarre fuckups.

This is so that you get precisely what's on the menu, no matter which location you happen to be at, thus avoiding the terrifying double-headed bogeyman of "local flavor" and "change."  You don't like mayo on your club sandwich?  Fine.  All I have to do, after punching that [Club Sandwich] button, is bring up the meal and hit two more buttons: [86] the service industry lingo for "no," and [Mayo].  The catch is that for everything you change, I have to follow the same process.  Can you see how this could become problematic when you decide to play mix-and-match with every conceivable spice, condiment, side, and topping?  Also bearing in mind that the odds are English is not the first language of the cook preparing your dish?

It gets even worse when you decide to build your own meal from scratch without regard for the actual food the restaurant offers, because - guess what? - there is no fucking button for that.  Instead, we have to try to assemble your plate like Dr. Frankenstein from one of the preexisting entrees, modifying roughly 17 conditions in the process and tying up that computer terminal for ten minutes.  Then you wonder why your meal took a bit longer to hit the table?  And you have the audacity to bitch that it's not what you ordered?  When I said we don't have burritos, I wasn't just trying to hide the massive hoard of delicious burritos from you so I could have them all for myself - I said it because we don't make them.

Which reminds me of a sidenote.  Do not attempt to argue with your server about items that (1) the restaurant has discontinued or (2) never offered.  Menus do change over time, and when a company opts to stop making a particular dish, they generally stop stocking the ingredients as well.  Nuts, huh?  At my workplace, not a month goes by when some jackass doesn't ask for a particular kind of nacho platter we literally discontinued over three damned years ago.  Give up the torch, dude, they are gone.  It's gotten to the point where I myself am not even entirely sure which nachos they are referring to, and I have served there continuously the whole time.  I guess Jesus must have dropped by three years ago and invented them.  Well, sorry, we quit making Christ Nachos.

Similarly, let's just pretend I am the server who is and has been at this restaurant day in and day out for several years, and you are the none-too-bright patron who stops in once or twice a month; believe me, I know our menu better than you.  You did not get our colossal onion-petal appetizer here two weeks back, because we stopped serving it in April 2009.  And, no, for the last time, we never had burritos.  Ever.  Period.  This is not up for debate, so don't you dare roll your eyes at me and condescendingly assure me, "Oh, you used to, it must have been before your time."  My servile status is degrading enough without you telling me how to do my job.  Compared to you, I am Gordon Ramsay.  You are . . . Pauly Shore.  At best.

Do not make me cut you.

 Ludicrous as it sounds, my coworkers and I have waited on plenty of people who do not even know what restaurant they are in.  Seriously.  They can't figure out why the individual they were supposed to meet for dinner isn't showing up, until they realize they are at a totally different chain.  And it's not that they misheard or could not recall the agreed-upon meeting place, it's that they literally thought they were inside a different restaurant altogether, because apparently to the untrained eye and TomTom-dulled brain, all casual dining establishments are indistinguishable.  I have even had customers try to pay their tabs with gift cards from our competitors, I shit you not, and they weren't making a lame attempt at a joke. You couldn't be troubled to ascertain your specific physical location in the world, but now you want to argue with me about what you ate "here" a month ago and why we "got rid of" Mellow Yellow and sweet potato fries?

So, in summary, employees of the serving industry drink a lot.

Just like Carson.

Things You Didn't Know Make You an Asshole at Restaurants, Part 1

So you think you can eat at a restaurant?  You believe you possess the requisite tact and grasp of proper etiquette to dine out and not make a dick of yourself?  Guess again.  Tipping like it's 1945, letting your bastard offspring scream and wail for forty minutes straight, and treating your server like Starscream to your Megatron are only the more obvious ways to fail at restaurant-going.  Here are a few tips on the finer points of not being That Asshole at your favorite restaurant, gaffes you probably never even considered faux paus, because you were too busy wondering why saying, "Hey, we're in a hurry, we have a movie to catch in forty minutes" had no appreciable effect on the space/time continuum or the physics of cooking food, nor did it magically move your order to the front of the queue.  ("Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize!  Fuck all these other customers, we'll make your shit first!  Fire up the flux capacitor!")

Picking your own table

They have restaurants where you get to choose your own seat.  Typically, they feature an obnoxious cartoon character as a mascot and "funployees" sporting novelty visors.  Either that, or a breakfast-anytime menu and dead-eyed waitresses with names like Ethel and voices like James Earl Jones' crossed with Joan Rivers.'  If your contact with the service industry is limited to annoying us, you may not realize that there is an order in which we seat tables, called a rotation.  This is a written sequence that, ideally, maximizes the quality of the service you receive by ensuring that no server becomes overwhelmed, because it takes into account the servers' skill level, proximity to other tables, who was last to take a table, etc.  Hence, when you waltz in, especially during a busier period, and say, "Oh, we want that nice, big booth in the far corner away from everyone else with the window," you are fucking up the rotation, if not outright demanding a table in a closed section.  You would be amazed how much consternation and confusion this can create amongst the staff.  We'll do our best to accommodate, but odds are good your service may suffer, and you are starting off on the wrong foot with even the perkiest server.

Her friendly smile conceals her seething resentment at your presumptuous arrogance.   And, no, I didn't mean "perky" that way.

Ask yourself this: five minutes after you have sat down, are you even going to remember that it mattered where that seat is?  How is this going to affect the taste of your meal or the quality of the conversation?  Trust me when I say most of you are so self-absorbed and utterly oblivious to your surroundings that you will soon make yourself more comfortable than your neighbors would like.  Half the time, I suspect people insist on particular seating, especially booths, from force of habit and subconscious societal programming, rather than any definable benefit.  Do you have a booth at your house?  Why not, if that's by far the most luxurious, comfortable option?

The same goes for requesting the bar or dining side of a split restaurant.  Again, we have our reasons for seating customers the way we do.  Despite what your righteously-moral Christian upbringing may suggest, the lounge in Zinger's is not frequented solely by knife-wielding, raucous, degenerate boozers and cleavage-baring, foul-mouthed biker sluts.  It's mostly just people like you in there, only less prejudiced.  Conversely, some people seem to be under the comically inaccurate misapprehension that service is somehow inherently better and faster in the bar.  If anything, it is the opposite in most restaurants.  For starters, there is a more casual atmosphere and the tacit assumption that you are not in a hurry.  Anyway, the food all comes from the same kitchen, Sherlock.  Second, bars in casual dining eateries are often the most minimally-staffed areas; in some cases, it's just the bartender, who has to not only wait on more tables than everyone else, plus the guests at the rail, but also make every drink for every table in the whole building.  Oh, yeah, and if the place offers food to go, the duties of taking the calls, bagging the food, and handling the transactions often fall on the bartender, too.

"Yeah, sure, pull up a seat!  I'll be with you in ten minutes or when I damn well feel like it, whichever comes first!"

So, if you see that over half the tables around the bar are already occupied, and a frenzied employee is racing around the space like a caged marmot on methamphetamine, understand that you may be waiting a few extra minutes for that first toasted marshmallow espresso martini.

Refills

Refills. We all drink 'em. I remember when I was a young teenager, and my goal was to see how many Mountain Dews I could down in the course of one meal, probably inadvertently consuming so much Yellow 5 that my impotency could be passed on even to my adopted children.

Well, I was a little prick.

You chuckle and make certifiably-retarded camel jokes or say things like, “Ha, I guess I was really thirsty!” (As if soda - a beverage consisting mostly of sugar, substitute sugar, and/or sodium - is a hydrating thirst-quencher.) But do you know what your server is thinking while they fake-laugh along with you? Fuck this fucking guy, I haven't even finished taking his fucking food order.  Only sometimes in less-civilized language.  We have roughly a bajillion things to do on a busy shift.  Is one of them bringing you refills?  Yes.  Does that mean topping off your goddamn Diet Coke every six minutes?  No.  Which, by the way, sort of eliminates the whole "diet" aspect, as does asking me to dump grenadine in each refill (roughly 15 grams of sugar per serving, oh health-conscious one).

Daily recommended allowance: not half the bottle, surprisingly.

Remember, at any given time I may have as many as twenty other people who need shit, too.  And that's to say nothing of stocking the front of the kitchen, busing and wiping off tables, running food out to every other server's tables in addition to my own, making sure the cooks have dishes on which to serve your meal, and sweeping up shit your Dr. Pepper-powered, cracker-smashing, Sweet'n'Low-flinging, salt-shaker-sucking (gross) nightmare fucking gremlin of a child has chucked on the floor while you laughed and looked on.

Yeah, really precious.  You know what?  Keep drinking Yellow 5.

Think of it this way: do you drink a two-liter with every meal at home?  Actually, judging by the fact that you'll likely need a crowbar and a jar of Vasoline to get out of the booth, you probably do. Stop that.  Or, if you just can't resist the urge to suck on a straw like a jonsing Saigonese crackwhore, understand that you are going to be without a beverage for a while.  Tough shit.  Hot food and greeting a new table comes before your fifth flavored pseudo-lemonade, which, by the way, contains precisely 0% juice.

Using other tables

I just want to clarify something right now:

This is a table.

This is a coat rack.

Notice the subtle difference?  Notice how they actually look nothing fucking alike?  Then why do you think it's acceptable to use them interchangeably?  Believe it or not, we restaurateurs have another use for that table: seating other customers.  Just because there isn't anyone there at that exact moment, doesn't mean we had no intention of putting people there any time during the course of your meal.  Agonizing and enjoyment-destroying as it may be, sit on your coat. You are the one who chose to dine at an establishment too casual for a cloakroom (the presence of tacky 80s and 90s memorabilia on the walls is a good indicator of the restaurant's relative status).  Also . . .

This is not the same as . . .

. . . this.

One of these things is not like the other, capiche?  It is not OK to discard your unwanted dishes, napkins, and table scraps on another, vacant table.  Not only does it render that table unusable, it gives us, your humble servants, yet another thing to clean up.  If you're that desperate to have the surface cleared, put the flatware and napkins on top of the plate and push it to the edge.  Assuming your server isn't occupied refilling a mango-kiwi decaffeinated green tea for the ninth time, s/he will take the hint and whisk away said refuse as quickly as possible.  Likewise, it's not cool to use another table as a secondary lounging area, nor as a playground for your spastic Children of the Corn.  We already gave you a table to use.  Use that one.  While we are on the subject of lounging . . .

Lounging

I know you go out to a restaurant to relax, have a good time, and avoid the hassles of food preparation and cleanup.  As a guy whose fridge seldom contains more than takeout leftovers, year-old condiments, and beer, I sympathize.  And when you are a paying customer, you buy the right to use our business-space for a while.  However, that does not legitimize you (1) putting off ordering for an hour while you wait for someone to join you or until the mood strikes you, (2) protracting the meal to an hour-long affair as you leave the food untouched while you natter incessantly, or (3) hanging out more than half an hour after said food has been consumed.  I know this is confusing, because an eatery looks kind of like your dining room, only with more tables and lots of strangers and even less-tasteful, "nostalgic" decor, but it's not.  Get in, get fed, get out.  That's the real motto of any restaurant, at least in the realm of casual dining.

Sorry to shatter the illusion.

The industry doesn't do reservations for precisely this reason; if you could call ahead and get a table before a person who just walked in the door, it wouldn't be very casual, would it?  I think this is the inherent problem with the target demographic of casual dining (ie. middle-class WASPy bourgeoisie who like to think they are living the high life by eating at a restaurant with servers, but actually have only a dim idea how chain restaurants work and almost no clue how truly class places are).  As a result, we as servers are supposed to "make every guest feel special" or some such bullshit, when by definition treatment isn't "special" if you give it to each and every shit-thick fuckwit who walks in the door, which we are required to do.  And, because your table isn't reserved, you don't get to boguard it all night.  We are not a snobby bistro, a loitering-friendly coffeehouse, a conference center, or a library.  You are here to eat, not hobnob like a turn-of-the-century socialite.  I shit you not, I have had a trio of patrons ask to combine two six-person tables so they could go over blueprints at dinner.  Are you fucking serious?  Realistically, from the moment you set food inside to the moment you get up to leave, no more than two hours should have passed, unless you are consistently ordering more drinks (not refills).

Ladies and seniors, I'm looking at you specifically.  More than any other group, these two subsets are guilty of grievously abusing anti-loitering policies, apparently because they lack even a vestigial sense of the passage of time.  In all seriousness, women, do you even agree on a timeframe when arranging to meet with your girlfriends?  Because judging by what I've experienced, you must call up Jennifer, Stacey, and Marissa and say something along the lines of, "Let's grab a bite at Shenanigans sometime before sunset."  Then, your posse of wannabe Sex and the City princesses proceeds to trickle in one by one over the course of three hours, after which you will take a further fifteen minutes to stop clucking like hens and cackling like hyenas, another twenty to decide you're just going to split two appetizers, and yet another hour and a half to actually eat that food.  Afterward, you will debate how to pay for the $23.00 tab you have collectively racked up, ask me to divvy it up in a needlessly complex way, then hand me a credit card to cover three out of the four checks you just had me divide.  And, sorry to say, most of you then tip about 12%.  Thanks, Vag Pack.

You wish.

And senior citizens?  I should not have to remind you that you are actively dying.  I know, I can smell it.  Every second is precious.  Do you really want to spend millions of them at Hijinks Grill and Bar?  I realize it's easy to get lost in the conversation when you can't remember where it started, where it was going, or that you already had the same one yesterday, but please limit your post-meal fond reminiscences and irritable bowel syndrome discussions to one hour.  Furthermore, if you are going to fight over who is paying the check - thoughtfully throwing me in the middle of the debate so that I have to referee your group like an adolescent birthday party - try tipping more than 10% when you triumphantly emerge from the fray as Most Gracious and Charitable Old Person.

That's all for now, kids, but rest assured this article is a To Be Continued . . .


*Note: That's a whole article without referencing Jersey Shore, MTV, Macintosh, any derivation of the word "douchebag," House, or over-reliance on technology.  Just saying.