F is for Fine Dining

I like eating out. I'm sure lots of other people do too, otherwise I wouldn't have a job. See, I bus tables at a steakhouse, and am therefore highly dependent on the good graces and wallets of others to make a semblance of a living. Hourly wages being what they are (minuscule), I basically rely on tips. Not as much as the waiters, whose paychecks basically break even after taxes, but still.

Now, there are rules to eating out that extend past what your mom told you about manners, even past Emily Post. Come to think of it, these things are so simple that Emily Post probably didn't even think of them, as she spent most of her time dealing with shrimp forks and the proper table placement of foreign dignitaries and such.

Food service is just that; a service industry. However, that doesn't mean that restaurant staff are servants in the medieval sense- mostly, they just bring you food, clean up and adjust the thermostat. That being said, there are certain things that every customer must remember to stay in the staff's good graces, and trust me- you don't want anybody at a restaurant hating you.

1. When tipping, give at least 15%, even if the service and/or the food sucks. Seriously. The service was probably bad because your server was having a crappy night, so unless you want them to snap on a busboy (which, believe me, is not a happy thing) help 'em out with a nice tip. They make their living by being almost inhumanely subservient, so acknowledge it with some cash. If you really want us to love you, tip on top of the gratuity. If you really want us to hate you, tip like it's 1945 or something. We do not forget, and we likely will not forgive. If you leave a bad tip, either don't come back ever or don't expect good service on your next visit.
2. Remember when your mom and/or elementary school had a "clean plate rule"? Well, it still applies in some respects. If you order too much food, you have two options: you can eat it all, or box it up and take it home. This is a big one for bussers, because we scrape all the plates. I can count on 75 hands how many 3/4 plates of chicken marsala, nibbled-on 16 oz prime ribs and half-eaten racks of ribs I've had to throw away because someone wasn't hungry or tactful enough clean their plate. I'm serious when I say that food safety laws and health codes are almost not enough to keep me from picking over an untouched plate of steak fries. However, I wouldn't do it, because people are gross. Come on, people. We have boxes and doggy bags for a reason. Also, you know how in "The Inferno" the final circle of Hell is reserved for traitors like Cassius and Judas Iscariot to be chewed on by Satan himself? Well, what they don't tell you is that there's another circle below that one (it's in one of the deleted scenes, if I remember correctly), and it's reserved for people like this guy we had at work tonight. He got the full rack of ribs, 'cause he's a man's man or some crap. So he eats all of his ribs but 10, and just to make sure the wait staff (who doesn't get to eat honey-prickly-pear-glazed baby back ribs, because we live on restaurant wages) doesn't eat his leftovers, he chews the top part of the ribs off. You know- that part where it curves and the skin is really thin and crunchy? Yeah. He nibbled it off like a little bug or some crap because he thought we would eat it if he didn't. Death is too good for him.
3. If you're the last customers to eat there, tip like you're the best customers all night. The place I work at closes at 9, and the last seating is at 8:30. Only on special occasions do we seat past then, and if that happens to you, count yourself lucky. We want to go home by 8, most of the time. Well, if one of the servers has a hangover, they want to go home an hour before they clocked in, but that's beside the point. Regardless, toward the end of the night, we're all finished with our closing work and we want to go sleep/party/convalesce from a night of dealing with bad tippers and non-clean-plate people (see tips 1 and 2). If you're seated last, be awesome and leave a big tip. You'll make all of us happy, and when you come back, we'll likely remember you as "the nice people" and treat you like the God Emperor of the Known Universe.
4. Little kids- where to start? Some of them are all right, in that they don't act like little kids, but others... Well, I'd go on, but I'd likely be called a supporter of extra-late term abortion or something. The bottom line is, don't bring your kids unless or until they can act decently in public. If they can handle the experience emotionally, they'll like it; they'll get to eat grown-up food, sit at a grown-up table and drink lemon water from a grown-up glass. Fun will be had by all! But if your kids are nightmares to you, they'll be nightmares to your server, who'll then have to try very hard to make it through the evening without an attempt on their own life. It's not pretty. Plus, if they die, I get tipped out less, which makes me sad, and no one wants to see me cry, right? RIGHT? :(
   
5. Just because we have to pick up after you doesn't mean you have free reign to destroy your seating area. Don't leave napkins and detritus strewn all under your table, or else we'll probably remember you as dirty and give you bad service next time. Seriously. There have been waaaay too many times where I've wished for a power sander or something instead of my flimsy rag because some slob smeared barbecue glaze all over half their table. Not to mention the rice from their rice pilaf that's all scattered in the sauce, and the broccoli and crap all over the floor... Ew. Granted, that's not as nasty as picking up a napkin and finding a spilled cup of french dressing under it, which then gets all over both my hand and the table, then drips off the napkin and all on the floor (this happened tonight, actually), but it's pretty close.
6. If you have a complaint, save it for the proper person and make sure it's about the proper subject. For instance, if your food isn't cooked right, don't chew out your server. They don't want to hear it, and they shouldn't have to. Just send it back and they'll fix it. If your food is slow, it's probably because we're really busy, which isn't our fault either, which brings me to another example of people who would- if this fine dining establishment were a movie theater- would get a spit corn. We were really busy this one night. I mean, we were totally packed, every table was full and we had a line up front. Busy. Anyway, this guy who's there with two of his friends gets a steak. Nothing crazy so far, since we have really good steak. However, the trouble starts when their server drops said steak on the ground- the whole plate just slides off the tray as it's being carried out to the table and expires in full view of the eating public amongst a mess of carpet fuzz and rice pilaf. "It's joined the restaurant invisible, it is an ex-sirloin" and so on. The server explains the situation to the guy, expressing heartfelt sorrow for dropping his dinner and promises a new (and better!) steak in 15 minutes. The guy's mad, but that could be understandable, if he had high blood pressure, was bipolar, had some severe social disorder or was incapable of sympathetic thought. So like 3 minutes later, the guy's new steak comes out, and the server explains that the cooks already had one coming, so they delayed someone else's order to please this guy. In a thus-far-unparalleled leap of rational thought, Mr. Steak Guy's logic train jumps from the "my steak was late, but now it's early!" track to the track labeled "my steak is earlier than predicted, therefore this new steak is the same steak that fell on the ground". Naturally, he proceeds to devise new swear words to use on his humbled waiter, who then defers to the manager. My manager can be very diplomatic, though this was apparently not one of those occasions; he took Steak Guy's abuse with a grin that said "I despise you and wish you'd die in a fire, and as a matter of fact, I have a couple fires going in the back right now, if you'd kindly follow me". Steak Guy caught onto this, so he just yelled louder until his stupid friends decided to get in on the fun as well. This continued for about 10 minutes until they left, probably without paying. Is hoping for a series of traffic accidents to claim the lives of former customers bad, or just not nice? I'm hoping for the latter.
7. If you have a special request to make, remember that "special" is the key word. We try to have a good selection of beverages, desserts and meat products, and will probably make you anything you ask for as long as we have the right ingredients and can name the price. However, don't go overboard, like a man I shall refer to as Filtered Water Guy. The first sign that he was trouble was that he brought a water bottle into a Michelin-starred establishment, as if our water was unfit for his person, but I just brushed this off as some strange personal affectation that I didn't need to ask and/or worry about. Spoiler alert! The water in your glass is tap water. No fancy filters or artisan springs, just recycling processes and fluoridation. If you think fluoridation is a commie plot, you can't fool me; I've seen Dr. Strangelove too many times to be fooled by that nonsense. Come to think of it, if you believe in that stuff, shouldn't you be wearing a tinfoil hat when outdoors so the government can't use the HAARP installation to read and manipulate your brain waves? Anyway, Filtered Water Guy received this moniker because, upon receiving his customary glass of lemon water and basket of warm, fluffy rolls, asked me straight out to describe the filtration process his water went through. This is what I like to call "weird". I told him, perhaps unwisely, that it wasn't put through special filters, which he answered with a nice little diatribe about the "insufficiency of carbon filters" and other such nonsense. Since I still had some faith left in humanity at this point, I decided to rectify the situation and bring him different water from a reverse-osmosis system. This was, evidently, not good enough for him either, and he also rebuffed the waitress' attempts to get him some San Pellegrino or Fiji water, claiming that we'd already ruined his water experience beyond repair. All this could've been averted, however, if he'd just not worried about our water and just DRANK OUT OF THE BOTTLE HE CARRIED IN WITH HIM. But noooo, this was just too much for him. Long story short, he ended up forgetting his bottle and his car keys on the table, which I summarily recovered. A lesser busboy would've contemplated revenge, but I thought I'd just turn the other cheek and wait for him to come back and be grateful that I didn't hide his stuff or something. When he did come back, though, he was still mad and ran off to do Filtered Water Guy things. Surprisingly, he ate there a couple more times, bringing with him and his bottle a different woman every time and a big stack of anarchistic literature. Huh.

If you read all that, congratulations! You now possess all the knowledge necessary to be an awesome restaurant customer!

If you skipped to the end, that's really too bad, since all my jokes were up there in the body. Oh well.

Either way, the point is that people at restaurants want to make you happy, if that includes giving you discounts, free dessert, up-selling booze or just generally being nice. Make our job easier by being nice back, even if you're having a bad night. It won't be a struggle to put on a facade of happiness for an hour just to please your server, because chances are, your server is putting on a facade of happiness for 6 or 7 hours to please you and everyone else in the whole building.