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.