Sorry man... I feel for ya!
I've had my share of lousy restaurant experiences, that's for sure...
One time my BIL and I took the MIL and my wife down to see her aunt in southern Indiana, dropped her off, and went to the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville... Spent the entire day roaming through the huge buildings covering like 100 acres of ground looking at the latest and greatest in agriculture technology, and picking up about 50 pounds of sales literature, brochures, freebies, samples, and such. Had a hot dog or two at the show, but not much else. SO, when we left, we were pretty well famished. We drove back thru southern Indiana toward the aunt's house, and stopped along the way for supper... as it so happened, at the world's worst Denny's. Evidently there was some sort of brou-ha-ha between the cook and the manager, with the cook not getting paid what he thought he should be getting paid; of course we didn't know this when we came in, sat down, and ordered. About 15-20 minutes after we came in, there was a screaming match in the kitchen, the cook quit, and stormed out the door... with a restaurant full of people waiting for food. The manager went back and started attempting to cook, and maybe an hour later we got our food... such as it was... "low grade dog food" comes to mind... dinner and a show though... LOL
Then there was the time we ended up at the world's worst IHOP on the north side of Evansville, Indiana. This was a few years later, and my wife, Keira, and I had gone SW from Indy to visit Betty's aunt and then we pushed on down to Evansville to spend the night at Motel 6. The next morning, we went to IHOP next door for breakfast. We walked in and ended up standing by the "please wait to be seated" sign for about 10 minutes or so before anyone offered to get us a table... Apparently there were four people working in the restaurant... a cranky beleaguered cook, a wire-thin old chain-smoking waitress with a "who the h3ll cares" attitude (personification of the "Maxine" cartoons), a cocky dumb teenage boy with a bad attitude and nothing going on upstairs, and an enormously pregnant weepy twenty-or-thirtysomething blonde who looked like she was about to pop at any moment with about three litters of puppies who was kinda clueless. Basically the old witch and the young punk were constantly sniping at each other and more worried about making sh!tty comments at each other than actually waiting tables and serving customers... the poor pregnant girl was just weepy and doing what she could to try to cover her tables and customers and help other customers that the witch and punk weren't taking care of as best she could, while occasionally taking flak from the other two... There was some sort of three-way argument going on with the cook in the back, with the witch and the punk trading insults with the cook from time to time, with basically the whole bunch trading half-shouted insults across the dining room, except the poor pregnant girl who actually appeared to be trying to do the job, just not doing it particularly well... We FINALLY got our food after about 30-40 minutes of listening to this insult radio-show between the three of them, and forget getting a refill or getting extra butter or syrup or anything else... the witch came over and plopped our plates down in front of us with a clatter and stalked off, shouting at the punk over some comment he'd just made at her a moment before... Honestly I have NEVER been in a worse-run restaurant in my life. Next time we went through there, they were broke and boarded up, and good riddance!
Now, my wife was in 'customer service', because all through college and even when she started teaching in Tennessee, she worked in a "somewhat upscale" department store that was bought out and changed names a half-dozen times, in the Green Hills Mall of Nashville, an upscale neighborhood... In fact one of her more famous customers was George "Goober" Lindsey... Anyway, she worked her way up, and in fact KEPT working at the store even after she graduated and became a public school teacher, because teachers were/are paid SO poorly in Tennessee that she HAD to keep working a second job at the store to pay her college loans and have food on the table and the rent paid. After a few years of teaching, she was miserable and overworked and sick of it, and quit teaching and got into a manager-in-training program at the store, and ended up being a manager of, at various times, housewares, menswear, lingerie, women's clothing, and kidswear. Right after we got married, the store chain was bought out by Foley's, which allowed her to transfer to the Sugarland store (SW Houston) when we moved back to Texas, and then they sold out to Macy's; not long after she was "let go" in the transfer/downsizing, but she was ready to get back into teaching and sick of retail anyway. SO, she has a long history with "customer service issues" and resolutions... she used to have 3-5 salespeople working under her in her department. Lets just say that Betty doesn't do well with managers who don't do their job...
Sunday before last, we went to the pool at El Campo after church, swam most of the afternoon, and then when they closed at 6, we decided to go to a new Mexican restaurant in Wharton... it's a "local chain" that my baby-sister-in-law (little brother's wife) is quite fond of, whom I consider "okay"... don't dislike them but not crazy about them either, but hey, let baby sister choose today... The restaurant USED to be a Chili's, but they went broke. Then it was a K-Bob's Steakhouse, but they went broke (overpriced and LOUSY food, and service was worse). Now it's a Mexican joint. So, we go in, and are taken back to the back corner of the dining room, which is ridiculously small, since fully HALF the restaurant is taken up by the "sports bar" occupying the other half, with a few tables along the wall and a huge bigscreen, and a wrap-around bar with a big mixing area in the center of it. The rest of the place is the "dining room" shoved full of booths and some tables along the wall, with narrow aisles. When we approach the table, shoved up against the wall, it's about the size of a kid's card table... maybe a little bigger... barely big enough for FOUR, but it's got SIX chairs crammed in around it, and we've got FIVE people... Now, NONE of us are little people-- Betty's six feet tall, I'm 6-1 and about 350, Keira's right at 5 feet tall and 110 (and about to start fourth grade!), my brother Jason is 6 foot and about 325, and his wife Leslie is about 5-4 or 5-5 and maybe 160 (guessing). So we're trying to get in and sit down at this glorified kids card table, with this tiny aisle next to us, hemmed in by booths on the other side, and THREE waitstaff just standing around right behind us in the aisle, basically with thumbs up butts from what I could see... So it takes us a minute to get ourselves "worked in" around the table... As Betty was getting in by the wall, a waiter pushed past me and apparently made some offhand remark in Spanish that elicited a laugh from the two female waitresses standing in the aisle behind me, and while I didn't really even notice, Betty sure did! So we finally got arranged and sat down, and ordered and got our food and had a pretty decent meal, though there was little/no follow up service for tea refills and such... we tend to order water a lot, because 1) they charge about $2 bucks a glass now, usually more, even for tea, which is just a way to jack up the price of a $7.50-8.00 meal to over $10 bucks to make more money, and 2) if I get tea, I want it sweet, which means I add sugar, and I don't need the extra sugar, so I usually just drink water and plenty of it. This seems to PO waitstaff, but to h3ll with them-- that's what they're there for! Keep the glass filled and you'll get a good tip. Don't and you won't.
SO, we get up to leave, and Betty asks to see the manager. Keira and I go to the cans, and when we come back, Betty's in a rather heated discussion with this young punk that had pushed past me in the aisle, with him mouthing off to her "I DON'T disrespect my customers... You heard wrong, I don't know WHAT you think you heard, I don't disrespect my customers..." and she was saying "I know what I heard, and the other two girls laughed... that isn't right!" and so Keira and I just went on to the car. Later I found out what it was all about... I didn't even hear the comment and laugh from the girls, I was too busy trying to figure out how we were all gonna sit at this stupid card table and not completely plug off the aisle from the kitchen to the rest of the restaurant. Turns out, the punk kid who pushed behind me and made the crappy comment in Spanish to his girlfriend waitresses, WAS the manager! When Betty confronted him about the comment, instead of just saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, you must have misunderstood... I apologize if you were offended" and moving on, he wants to stand there and ARGUE with her, which is TOTALLY the wrong thing to do from a customer-service standpoint... You SHOULD make the customer "feel" right, even if they're "wrong"; just make a "pat on the head" comment to soothe the situation, even if you just blow it off and laugh or giggle about it with the waitstaff after the shift is over... you don't stand there and argue with the customer...
Anyway, it's not the first time we had a lousy experience there... when it was K-Bob's, my parents and I went there one day for lunch when we were running errands. My mom doesn't get around well, Dad's handicapped and uses a scooter chair to get around, and they put the handicapped spots BEHIND the restaurant at the back corner from the entrance. THEN they routed us to the back corner of the bar side of the restaurant when they seated us. There WAS a "back door" to the dining room there right beside the handicapped spots, but they had the door locked and junk stacked up in the portico between the dining room and door. My folks have bad teeth, and mom ordered fish or something; Dad got something he THOUGHT would be tender enough to eat with his bad teeth... like carne guisada or something. Turns out THEIR idea of carne guisada was just to cut up a regular el cheapo grilled mini-steak (same one I had grilled) and splash a little enchilada gravy over it... so it was too tough for him to eat. He told this to the manager and confronted him about the handicapped parking, and the fact that they didn't even have the back door by the handicapped spots open for handicapped people to come in, and the manager was just adversarial and argumentative and didn't listen to anything he said... So, we never went back.
Betty had a solution to that sort of thing when she was in college... a friend of hers had recently returned from studying overseas or some overseas trip to Greece, and she still had Greek money on her. They ate lunch and had a cocky punk waiter who was lousy and bad attitude, so when they left, the left a drachma as a tip... which is about 1/20th of a cent... My folks and I used to frequent a local Chinese restaurant that had a waitstaff with a rather bad attitude, and some days their attitude was definitely worse than others... One day they were pushy and argumentative and bad attitude with my mom, and she left without leaving ANY tip after having put up with them, and the waiter chased her down outside the restaurant demanding a tip! That sort of took the cake IMHO... you're not AUTOMATICALLY ENTITLED to a tip... When eating alone, if you took care of me, I'll leave about $2 tip on a roughly $10 meal. If you REALLY took GOOD care of me, I'll leave $3. If you just brought the water or tea and plate and I had to flag you down for a refill or something and you took your time about it, you may only get $1. If you didn't bring a refill, forget it. You get nothing. I follow about the same principle when it's the three of us... with about $5 for okay service, $6 or so for GOOD service (depending how good), and maybe only $1-2 for crummy service.
Later! OL JR
