I’d like to begin this by saying I am a server who, at this point, has worked for the past 2 1/2 years in two popular, large restaurants. I feel like I have pretty much seen it all and i will tell you right now this will be the complaint to end all complaints.
Let me start with your first entering the restaurant. You approach the host stand and they lead you to a table. SIT AT THE TABLE. Do not wait until you’ve been brought somewhere and then point at a table you might prefer to sit in. If you have some sort of preference, the polite thing to do is to tell the host/ess before they choose a place to seat you. You may not realize this, but pointing at a specific table you want to sit in may be a huge pain in everyone’s ass. The host staff of a restaurant seat servers in sequence and you may be choosing a table that has no server at a time, or maybe has a server who has just been sat another table and is already busy. The business may run based on keeping customers happy, but the easier you make it by not behaving like the world revolves around you, the easier it will be for us to succeed.
Now, when your server greets you, don’t cut him/her off when the opening banter begins. Chances are, whatever you end up missing answers a question you’ll end up asking.
Drink orders. Don’t order double soft drinks. If you’re ordering an alcohol beverage or a cup of coffee then asking for a glass of water also isn’t overly annoying. Ordering a diet coke and a glass of water makes you high maintenance and irritating, especially when it prompts the other 5 people at your table to do the same. I am now carrying 12 heavy glasses full of liquid on a single tray to a table with only 6 people. Chances are, you won’t even touch one of the drinks. You’ll drink one exclusively and i will have to keep refilling it. Then some poor busser has to make two trips trying to clean off your table after you’re gone because of the unreasonable amount of still-full glassware on it. Seriously.
Don’t ask for your shit one thing at a time. Nothing makes someone want to spit in your soup more than you sending her to get a fork, then asking for a straw when she returns, then asking for bread when she brings the straw, then asking for another coke when she brings the bread. Are you kidding? Do you think you’re the only table I have? Do you just not care about anyone or anything but yourself? If you need things, that’s fine, ask for everything you can think of at once and I’ll gladly go get it. Also, there’s nothing a server loves to hear more than “when you get a chance,” it moves your request to the top of our priority list. However, “get me…” means you’ll be waiting quite a while. You may control our tips, but we control your entire experience.
Also, modifying your entree is cool. I don’t know anyone who has a problem with it. If you are going to completely invent something super complicated and then freak out when the kitchen gets confused and messes it up, you should probably just cook your own goddamn dinner.
Waving, shouting, or addressing me as “excuse me, waitress!” are completely unacceptable. You’ve got to be kidding me. I am probably at your table every several minutes asking you if you need anything. These desperate cries for attention make you look like an ignorant fool second only to getting up and walking around looking for me or following me. Seriously. While we’re at it, if you asked me for something, and then i took your order, and I haven’t walked away from the table yet, do not ask me for the same item again three times while I am still standing there. I can’t get your goddamn extra napkins until i walk to the place where we keep those things. Telling me you need napkins 6 times while i am trying to take your order is not going to magically give me the ability to pull your wants and needs out of my ass.
Do not, absolutely do not, order something i did not just list after you ask me a simple question and i provide you with an answer. examples:
“what are your choices of sides?”
“Garlic mashed potatoes, pasta, vegetable of the day.”
“I am going to have a baked potato.”
You’re not going to have a baked potato. Did I say baked potato? I did not.
“What dressings do you have?”
“Caesar, creamy parmesan, and italian vinaigrette.”
“I’ll have thousand island.”
Seriously? Not an option. LISTEN.
Do not ask to move tables after you have already ordered. Your order has been placed and will eventually print up with a table number on a ticket that lists the items you want to eat. If you move you are not only screwing up servers who take the same specific set of tables all night, but you are messing up the person who runs that food and takes it to the wrong place.
Don’t get up and stand in a walkway somewhere. We’re busy. We’re really busy. We walk fast, and we only ask you to move because we have to be polite to keep our jobs. Believe me, if we had our way, we would throw hot food at you for being so stupid that you feel it is okay to stand in a place that I need to run back and forth through with a heavy tray of steaming food. Furthermore, if you are in the way and I say excuse me and you turn around and see me with the heavy tray of steaming hot food, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY and don’t you dare have the nerve to look like I am inconveniencing you by doing my job. No one told you to stand in my way and the sooner you move the faster this table gets their food and the faster they eat, leave, and you can sit down and enjoy your own meal. Also, if you weren’t aware, the words “excuse me” are generally understood to be a polite way of saying “get out of my way.” The appropriate response to hearing them is to get out of the way, not turn and acknowledge the person who needs to get past you and then continue to stand there blocking his or her path. If you do this and get hit or pushed, that’s really your problem.
Now, about your kids! First of all, if your baby is crying, get the kid out of the building, you’re ruining the meals of a good 150 people and aggravating a staff of maybe 40 people. Why do you have a 2 month old at a loud restaurant at 10pm anyway? Last week I watched a 5 year old topple sideways out of a tall bar chair that is nearly four feet off the ground. Is there any reason you are letting this rambunctious little asshole behave like this in a potentially dangerous place? Control your goddamn children, and if you can’t, leave them home. I know babysitters are expensive, but if you can’t afford one every now and then, you probably shouldn’t be going out or you should have done a better job training your kids.
Do not ask anyone working in a restaurant to turn the air conditioning or heat up or down ever. NOT EVER. What on earth could make someone so self centered as to ask someone to change the climate of a large building filled to capacity just because he or she is personally a little warm or cool? What if everyone else in the building is comfortable? What makes you so special that you feel our climate control should be changed as if this were your living room? Also, no server in his or her right mind will ever actually send a manager to lower the air conditioning. We are going back and forth to a very hot kitchen wearing uncomfortable long-sleeved polyester uniforms. If you wore shorts and a tank top to a building you knew was air conditioned, you’re pretty frickin’ stupid. We’re hot and customers are comfortable. We’re keeping the building cool. You’re gonna have to deal because you are not the only person there.
Large parties of people who all want to sit together are not easy to accommodate or take care of. Try to be a little bit organized if you’re going to inflict this kind of inconvenience on a restaurant.
Separate checks are generally a pain in the ass. In many restaurants the servers aren’t able to split checks on their own after they have been put into the computer and finding a manager to do this on a saturday night is not easy. In other restaurants the process is a bit simpler but frankly, if there are only two of you at the table, you should be able to do the math. Are you really so cheap that you are terrified of estimating what you owe and accidentally paying an extra dollar or two? Splitting checks, especially for larger parties of people, can be an extreme inconvenience, and usually results in customer confusion leading to severely undertipping, which I will get to in a moment. If you can’t figure out how to pay the bill in a restaurant, you’re probably too stupid to be eating in a restaurant.
Don’t flag down any random server to ask for something, unless you’re in a serious situation like you have your meal and somehow have no fork. If you want napkins, butter, a glass of water, more bread, etc., please ask your own damn server. If you ask someone else I can fully guarantee that person is immediately annoyed, doesn’t have time to get anything for you, and is now stuck trying to find your server to take care of you while at once trying to remember what you wanted along with all of the things the people at his or her own tables need. If you have to be this annoying, you could at the very least be polite about it. Usually, people aren’t.
Now, tipping. I thought about writing this entry separately and then i realized that first, no one is going to read this whole thing, and second, I will probably post 15 more entries elaborating on this. 10% tips are unacceptable. This day and age 15% is becoming unacceptable. Also, there is no high-end cap to where you have to stop tipping a percentage of the bill. Leaving a $10 tip on a $50 check is great, but if you leave a $10 tip on a $100 check we hate you. Here’s the thing about restaurants, servers do not keep their tips entirely. Before we leave each night we do a bunch of math and hand a bunch of cash over to bartenders, host/ess staff, and bussers. If you leave us a $10 tip on a $100 check we’re only seeing about $6 of that. You just left a $6 tip on a $100 check. I have bills to pay. My job may seem easy and mindless but chances are you couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. Tip appropriately. Also, tip with money, not words. If you tell me I was a fantastic server and then leave me a 12% tip I definitely hope you get in a car accident on your way home. I appreciate the compliment, but when I have to pick up an extra shift to make up the difference of the money I lose when morons who tip verbally short change me those compliments really mean a lot less. I know i do my job well, but I feel much better about it when i can go out to dinner myself and be pampered rather than struggling to make my car payment because I’ve had a restaurant full of canadians (who tip about 10% on average) screwing me over. Just F.Y.I. servers make $4.something an hour. We pay taxes. We give chunks of our tips away. Yes, some of us make pretty good money, but the idea of us leaving with $300 in out pockets and having more cash than we know what to do with is an absolute myth. We sit down at the end of the night and whine about our backs and feet, we count our tips and are usually disappointed having made significantly less than we should have given our sales and hard work. Don’t make our nights any worse and don’t blame our choice of working there. Most restaurant employees are full time college students who need a flexible schedule and hope to make as much as possible while working few enough hours to pull decent grades. You’re not better than us, the extra dollar or few between a shitty tip and a good one will not kill you. If you can’t afford to tip appropriately then you can’t afford to go out to eat.
Seriously people, I know this is a personal rant and most of you don’t even consider this stuff, but maybe you should. I’m polite to retail employees and I always have my account number ready when i call customer service lines. I am totally courteous when being provided with a service because I am generally grateful to the person who is providing that service. I could write a book of examples of morons I have encountered in my places of business. Seriously sit back and think of how many things I named that you’re guilty of because I can guarantee you some angry person tells that story all the time and people laugh at how frickin’ stupid you must be.
Oh, and when i tell you the plate is hot, don’t grab it and make some sort of exclamation about how you just burned yourself. You were warned. You’re an idiot.
