Dear friends,
If you're reading this blog on purpose, then you're probably intelligent, savvy, classy, potty trained, intellectually curious, not easily offended, and look really hot naked. Chances are, you also eat out, and know how to enjoy the experience without embarrassing yourself and those around you. This, therefore, is not directed at you. Rather, it is intended as a tool of convenience, to be thrust, when needed, at the unfortunate assholes that may populate your life. Like all unfortunate, life populating assholes, these are people we are loathe to confront in person, for fear of the inevitable confrontation likely to turn your therapist's advice to challenge your (insert unfortunate asshole relation here) head on into a frustrating waste of the five minutes you could have spent masturbating.
Therefore, when faced with the conundrum of the witless friend, lover, uncle, co-worker, or perfect stranger you'd love to strangle some manners into, feel free to send them here and make me the bad guy (Please note that for extremely delicate situations with people you want to keep around, you may want to check out Food Woolf, a thoughtful, friendly, patiently crafted food blog written by a fellow restaurant insider who doesn't drop the F-bomb nearly as much as I do).
Here then, is your mildly civil, almost friendly guide to behaving yourself when dining in public:
First off, thank you for dining out. Thank you for making the conscious decision to leave your home and support someone else's business. Thank you for putting money into someone else's pocket while allowing them to put food and drink into your belly. And thank you for recognizing that you're getting something valuable for your hard earned money. From the bottom of my heart and the depths of the collective soul of the entire service, agricultural, and culinary industries: Thank you!
Now, please, for the sake of the tens of millions of other people dining out with you every single day across the country and around the world, and for the sake of the tens of thousands of professionals doing their best to serve you, follow these simple rules and don't be an asshole.
1) Use caution when before pronouncing yourself a "foodie". More and more, this term has become synonymous with douche-baggery (No really, the New York Times will back me up and everything). Chances are, unless you've spent years training, studying food and wine with actual chefs, and have at least a subtle comprehension of how the restaurant industry works, you are not a food critic. Sites like Yelp and City Search were intended to help the curious diner select an establishment that might best suit his or her culinary tastes and aesthetic preferences. Instead, they've become a cesspool that grows more unreliable with every manifesto masquerading as a review posted by people even more opinionated and clueless than me. Resist.
2) Perspective is your friend. Good, fast, and cheap rarely exist in the same universe. You have every right to expect and seek out all three. Good luck finding it; I wanted to wake up Christmas Eve and catch Santa Claus fucking the Tooth Fairy so I could blackmail his jolly ass for life and end up with all the sex toys my little heart desired. That was back when I was five, and I've been waiting ever since.
3) Don't claim a food allergy unless you actually have one. An allergy means that you have a hard time digesting something, all the way up to having a catastrophic attack that could actually end your life and bankrupt the place you've chosen to enjoy your last meal. It is not a preference. It is not an aversion based on psychological hangups best remedied with psychiatric drugs, electro-shock therapy, or both. An allergy is exactly that. It is nothing more, and it is certainly nothing less.
When you tell your server that you're allergic to peanuts (or shellfish, gluten, eggs, certain spices, seeds, wooden chairs, or small children), you set off a chain reaction that involves every single person involved with preparing your food. Kitchen managers, floor managers, line cooks, prep cooks, bussers, food runners - literally everyone associated with the plate that will be set before you - are informed, consulted to make sure that you can be served safely, and then made to bend over backwards preparing your meal separately to ensure that you not only enjoy the dish you've selected, but that you continue breathing. If it's handled correctly, this process is seamless, and you, the diner with the horrible, life threatening allergy to canola oil, are left to more important things like the conversation you're having about the kinky sex you had last night involving a tub of Crisco and a can of Raid.
If you claim an allergy, then you'd damn well better have one. If you don't, you're being a jackass, and you deserve to be jabbed in the neck with an EpiPen.
3) Restaurant menus are not grocery lists. Dishes are described, sometimes in excruciating detail, in order to inform, and hopefully entice you to order them. The vegetables a chef selects to accompany a particular cut of meat are not the result of some haphazard orgasmic seizure where they just spray a plate with anything that grows out of the earth just because they can get their hands on it. Asking to have the braised carrots that accompany the veal stracotta placed next anything that isn't the veal stracotta is the equivalent of mixing Coca Cola, Sprite, Fanta, and Mr. Pibb at the soda fountain because you have an empty cup in your hand and your taste is in your mouth. You're free to do it when you're on your own, but don't ask anyone that knows better to do it for you.
If you find a place where the restaurant staff is courteous enough to modify the carefully crafted dishes on the menu to your liking (and more and more restaurants are refusing to change a single thing due to the abuse they've endured), do so with the understanding that there's a good chance you may not like the finished result. You've plucked a beautiful flower and defiled it in ways nature never intended, so if it tastes like poo, it's your fault. And yes, you still have to pay for it.
"I'm a girl, I'm used to modifying things" doesn't mean that you don't have to pay for stuff. It does, however, mean that Gloria Steinem would like to reach out and bitch slap you.
You are not allergic to too much sauce, no matter how believable that sounded in your head.
Unless you're asking for more ketchup, sauces are made with actual ingredients that cost money, by real live people who don't cook for free. Ask for the stuff up front and expect to be charged at least something for it. Excluding most salad dressings, which are usually made in batches (small and large) since they can be kept chilled, asking for extra Bolognese or browned butter sauce after your meal arrives at the table means that it has to be ordered, queued up behind several other dishes already being prepared (even though your server asks for it to be rushed through), and is likely to arrive as your friends are finishing their meals, just in time for you to complain that your food is now cold.
4) Get off your phone.
5) Your laptop doesn't belong in a restaurant. Coffee shop, maybe, so long as you keep ordering enough food and drink to justify your stay, and you get your ever-loving ass out of there when the place fills up and the old woman juggling scalding coffee and a walker can't find a place to sit. Use common sense, and remember that you're lugging a very expensive piece of hardware that's incredibly vulnerable to both heat and moisture into an environment rife with both. People spill things all the time, accidentally, and, if you're a dickhead, accidentally on purpose. If you happen to be the dickhead that spread out by yourself at a table intended for four with your homework and a $3 cup of soup for three hours at the height of the lunch or dinner rush, you won't know the difference when the rain comes.
No, you may not charge your phone, drape the 25 foot extension cord you brought from home across the room because your battery is about to run out, or have your FedEx package delivered to the host stand. Office space is available for rent somewhere near you, and sometimes it even comes with a kitchen.
6) That Tweet can wait. Trust me, nobody cares.
7) If you're clearly over 21, and you're on a date with someone who isn't, don't try to order booze for them. No, you can't vouch for them, and yes, they need a valid ID. And whatever you do, don't order one for yourself and sneak them sips when you think nobody's looking. It's tacky, it's creepy, and everybody knows you're doing it. Everybody.
Nobody worth their salt cares how much you're gonna tip, serving some underage nimrod, who may or may not be the date you're trying to get into bed, can earn even a thriving establishment a hefty fine and the loss of a very expensive license to sell alcohol, thus ending aforementioned status and potentially bankrupting the entire place, not to mention the immediate termination of the server you threw an extra five bucks and the bartender who poured the drink, before opening all involved parties up to potential lawsuits if the underage nimrod goes and hurts himself or others after you finish getting them drunk.
8) The bartender doesn't cut you off because she's an asshole, or because she "isn't any fun". Selling you drinks is how she makes her living, so you've got to imagine that you're one sloppy, no fun, drunken son-of-a-bitch if she's about to take a financial hit and tell you that you can't have anymore. You still have to pay your tab, you'd better fucking tip her properly, and the next time you come in - sober - you'd better apologize for letting yourself get so out of hand, before you order the first drink. Otherwise, you become "that guy".
If you got so drunk that you peed on the bar stool...and the floor, you need a new place to hang out, preferably one where the strongest thing they serve is coffee and tough love.
9) No seriously, get off your phone before someone goes and jams it down your throat. And that blinking bluetooth thing attached to the side of your face isnt likely to land any planes while you're having lunch. Not even the President of the United States uses one at meal times, and he's a lot busier than you are. Put it away, you look like your high school gym teacher did when you ran into him at the mall and he had a beeper strapped to his belt clip.
10) The tip is not a negotiation.* You came, you ate, you didn't have to prepare the delicious food you enjoyed, and it was served by someone who isn't your mother. 18-20% of the total bill is what all this costs. Fancy yourself a sovereign citizen and wanna figure it all pre-tax? Be my guest. Want to operate like a pro and do the math on the whole thing? Huzzah!
Whatever you do, understand this: the moment you decide to under-tip, or, heaven help your eternal mortified soul, stiff your server somewhere for any reason, you lose the right to complain about service anywhere.
But rather than go into a some breathless rant on the importance of tipping, how and when to do it, blah, blah, blah, I leave you in Google's capable hands. Look it up, people far less prone to hyperbole than myself have written extensively about the subject, and many are well worth the read...However, know that if you don't tip properly, you will be responsible for locusts, frogs, rivers turning to blood, and the premature expiration of every first-born throughout the land. No pressure.
*the gratuity section varies internationally, but for the purposes of this article, I'm using the American standard.
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