Dining Out In The New Economy

My wife and I like to go out to eat at restaurants about once a week because it gives me a break from coming up with the daily gastronomical delicacies that I whip up in my kitchen. And yes, it is MY kitchen. To my wife it is just a huge cooler where the Diet Coke is housed. Anyway, I feel that every dining experience has the potential to be an epicurean adventure, no matter where you go, so I’m pleased when we go to new places and try things we haven’t had the pleasure of yet.

I was chatting about this the other day with my buddy Randy, who works in San Jose as a waiter for a popular Italian restaurant chain. I was telling him of my latest dining experience, which didn’t go as well as I had hoped. I felt the wait was excessive, the food slow to the table, the chicken was overcooked and the ambiance was negated by the shrill screams and wild running about of small, unattended children. (Honestly, my wife and I now cringe and debate about leaving whenever we see children in nice restaurants. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction.)

He just smiled and nodded knowingly and asked me “so did you leave a lousy tip, then?” Well, no, I didn’t. I am usually quite generous with tips, especially with having had my kids and many friends in that profession at one time or another. I left the waiter a regular tip. As a rule of thumb, I just double the tax and round up, which comes to about 18% or so. I leave more if I feel the waiter did an exceptional job.

He smiled and told me he was proud of me because a lot of people wouldn’t have been as understanding. He said waiters often bear the brunt of their patron’s bad experiences even though they usually don’t have anything to do with it. He explained that the time waiting for tables to open up would be a lot less if people wouldn’t “camp out” at their table drinking coffee for hours after a meal. And as for the food being slow or overcooked, he said that happens frequently when the kitchen is short staffed or gets too busy. As for the out-of-control children, waiters hate that too. “Try carrying a tray filled with plates of hot food or hot drinks while the little bastards are running in front of you playing tag.” The point he was making was, of course, that just because the news was bad doesn’t mean you have to kill the messenger.

I feel sorry for waiters and restaurant workers in general because they really don’t get any respect. In fact some people new to this country have a misconception that they are slaves to be bossed around and abused and never, ever tipped. Randy said this is pretty common amongst patrons from India and Middle Eastern countries in particular. It doesn’t matter if you provide exceptional service and make sure all the glasses are kept full, the food is delivered promptly, at the right temperature and in the manner they requested it, the waiters still get stiffed.

For many guests there is an invisible wall when it comes to tipping whereas the maximum they could ever conceive of leaving as a gratuity is $5, even if the bill is over $100!  It's not necessarily an insult to the server; a lot of it is simply a matter of cultural differences.  Of course when it's your livelihood at stake, cultural differences don't mean a whole lot. Servers actually fight over not having to wait on certain people because they know from experience that they will be have to jump through all kinds of hoops and then still get stiffed with the tip.  Although that does seem a bit discriminatory, it helps to put things in proper perspective when you consider that tips make up the majority of a server’s income.

I like to listen to his stories from work. Just when I think that people couldn’t get any weirder, Randy tells me a story and proves otherwise. Like the guy who was so germ phobic he wouldn’t open the door to the restaurant, and would instead wait for someone to leave so that he could slide in without touching anything. Sometimes he would wait outside for awhile until a customer or a server let him in. Other times he would call ahead and ask for the food to be delivered to his car parked outside.

Always he insisted that it be packaged in a particular way in a tray and placed in a bag a particular way with the bag folded a particular way by someone who had sanitized their hands. From his car he watched with binoculars to make sure the server had someone open the door for them so their body didn’t touch anything that might contaminate the food. If he saw that the person delivering his food made contact with the door or door frame he would send it back to start all over again.

So that’s what happened to the bubble boy! Someone needs to get that guy a hazmat suit!

With the economy being in the tank, a lot of people have been trying to save money in unexpected ways when they dine out. At his restaurant, the child’s meal comes with free soft drink refills. Wary of this, parents are ordering water for themselves and when the meals arrive at the table they grab their kid’s soda and give them their water. *eye roll*

It’s not uncommon for their guests to purchase the cheapest meal on the menu, to share, and then request 5 or 6 loaves of the free French bread to eat with it. Or sometimes they will purposefully lie about bad service to get the manager to comp them a meal or get money knocked off their bill. The people that do this have it down to a science and keep coming back to the same restaurants and playing the same game every time with the same successful results. And of course when it comes to the tip, all the servers get for enduring the abuse and running themselves ragged is a derisive smirk when the customer leaves.

Despite the hardships and lack of respect, they still manage to have a good time at work most days. Randy told me a fun distraction common in restaurants is for the wait staff to let others know when a hot girl comes in so that that person can go check her out, sometimes with comedic results.

“So here’s what happened Thursday night. The hostess seats two young women at a back table in my section. One of them is smokin’ hot. I say hi, get their drink orders and go back to the kitchen and tell my buddy Keith about the hot girl. He says ‘I’m going go see for myself,” and goes back to check her out. Now consider that they are alone in the back section and there is no reason for anyone aside from their waiter to go back there. Keith comes back and says out loud, ‘oh hell yeah, she’s gorgeous!’

Naturally this gets the attention of some of the other servers and kitchen staff who now are all madly curious about the angel that is sitting in seat one at table 43. One by one they file on back there, trying not to look too much like stalkers as they pretend to wipe a nearby table or replace the salt and pepper shakers. A total of eleven guys and three girls took turns checking out the pretty girl and echoing Keith’s sentiments. So I go back there with their drinks and they are laughing, apparently not fooled in the slightest as to the intentions of the other staff.

Apparently some of the guys couldn’t help but stare like a deer in headlights.  Subtle.  Real subtle.

But instead of being mad, the cute one tells me that if we will shut down the parade she will let me take her picture.”

So I ask him, “So then what did you do?”

“Well, hell! I did what any other red-blooded American man would have done. You want to see her picture?”

Seriously, I'm just kidding.  Everyone knows Snooks is way to good for an Olive Garden.