The 10 Worst Things You Can Do to a Waiter

Image via Complex Original

Anyone who has worked for longer than a summer as a waiter will have a handful of horror stories about hungry, hungry humanity. People have horror stories about waiters and waitresses, too, but only one of those people is at work. Serving is easy and serving is hard. 

For some, waiting tables can be effortless. But for others, the multi-tasking, the requisite thick skin, the bad jokes, being ordered around by customers and managers alike, the long hours on your feet, the never-ending cleaning, serving of certain dishes to the point that they seem utterly unappetizing, the drunken ass-pinches, the impatient chefs, being too busy to eat dinner while everyone else shovels food into their faces, the confoundingly dumb questions, the come-ons of men and women who could be your parents, the ever-failing coffee maker, the hiccups of the new guy in the kitchen, and the attempt to hide everything in your life with an even tone, a composed clean uniform, and a believable smile is, simply, a nightmare.    

Many servers will tell you that a year in the food industry should be required before college, like a year of service in the army. You’ll learn a lot more about your fellow man, at the least. Ask your server about the frequency of his work-related nightmares. You'll be surprised by the answer of even the most steady hand in the restaurant.

Are you doing something to make your server’s life a living hell? We’re sure they don’t mind.

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10. Avoiding Eye Contact

There’s nothing that makes the word server seem more like the word servant than talking to one with your mouth and not your eyes. You are not in a drive-thru talking into a speaker, you are not ringing the butler’s bell so that he can remove your muddy boots, you are in a restaurant and the server’s only job is to give you a good experience. Not acknowledging them is the quickest way to show that you are not interested in the restaurant, the server, or humanity.

It doesn’t matter how bad your day is, that you’re sick, or that your girlfriend just dumped you in front of your parents. If your server says hello and, without looking up, you tell them what you want, you’ve just branded yourself the dining dead and don’t be surprised when they either forget you exist or hold a meal-long grudge against you.

9. Being Too Drunk to Be Served

Walking into a restaurant with beers and wine spritzers in hand may be legal in some states, but we wouldn’t know which ones, and we can tell you that in most places, that is enough for the restaurant to immediately cut you off from drinking for the remainder of the night. This is only one of the dozens of ways that your good time will get you in trouble at dinner. We’ve all been on vacation or turned 21 or met up with our sorority sisters after just, like, way too long (!), and we know how exciting it can be to disregard the restraints we normally live under, but people who show up to dinner drunk need to act like they’re keeping a secret. 

Partly because of the efforts of MADD, people are no longer held completely responsible for their alcohol levels. It is now up to those serving to protect themselves and their restaurants from life-ruining litigation if those people go on to cause harm after leaving the restaurant. So any of the funny or charming miscues of drunk dinners past won't fly anymore. Coming into a restaurant seeming sober and enjoying yourself and your company and having a few too many is no sort of crime at all.  But just because a restaurant has a bar does not necessarily mean it is a bar (except maybe T.G.I. Friday's, which is hell).

Want to get drunk and not be in the house? That’s what a bar is for. If you want good food and want to be sloppy as well, one at a time, please. 

8. Being Rude About the Food

This one is pretty basic. It's one of the general tenets of restaurants, and comes with the one and only hard-and-fast rule for eating out: respect. In this case, respect towards the food.

Let's talk about feedback for a second. There are three types of diners when it comes to dishing out criticism, constructive or otherwise: those who always give it, those who only give feedback when they’ve had a terrible experience, and those who would never dream of it. There is no right way to be in a restaurant. Whatever category you fall in is right for you, just keep a few things in mind. A good restaurant is sensitive to the opinion of its clientele (and is nothing without them).  Servers are the establishment's data collectors, and though your singular experience will probably have no real effect on the quality of the food, when combined with the all the amassed data, a dish can be improved or taken off the menu completely in place of something stronger, or something more in line with the rest of the menu. 

On the other hand, thinking that because customers make the restaurant go round, or because you know the owner, that your opinion is anything more than an opinion is frustrating. It’s not your restaurant, but a restaurant that you, and many others, are a member of its community. Show it love.

The most important thing to keep in mind with regard to this is to be specific (this is good to keep in mind when thinking about food, movies, dating, and your life in general). Think about what you liked or disliked about your food. Did the fish taste fishy? Was the soup too hot?

Listen to yourself before you speak.

Think about how the dish should come out and what the kitchen can do with your two cents. Then, give your words the ammunition of specificity. This also goes for dishes you've really enjoyed. For a server, it’s wonderful to hear how amazing a dish is, but that's also a very generic response; your server will really open up if you give them just a taste of what really set the dish apart.

7. Kids and Dogs off the Leash

Many restaurants are kid-friendly and fewer are dog-friendly, but this is no excuse to treat the eatery like it’s some sort of horribly unsafe daycare center. No matter how cute your toddler is, it takes many moments to get them out of a server’s natural walking lane and back to safety, something an attentive parent could take care of in seconds. Kids are messy, they wander, they play on furniture in a way thats danger is outmatched only by its unsanitary qualities, and they're loud. 

We love them anyway (most of the time), but crowding a person’s meal with noise, grime, and shock is as sure a way as any to take people away from their meal and buy them a ticket to a show they never wanted to see. If your kid becomes shirtless and is ordering extra sodas and cookies at the bar and making train cars out of the salt shakers, he is a bomb and he’s going off all over the place (cut the green wire!).

Dogs, well, we can blame them even less, but they can have the same effect on the patio. Even dog-friendly restaurants don’t employee dog whisperers, so don’t bring your unruly one-year-old who always wants to play and expect him to be content with your conversation about your sister’s new career. He wants that car and he wants to smell those people and is everything here food?!?!?!?!

6. Playing Name Games

This one is finicky and some servers may tell you that they like the niceties involved with tables knowing their names. Many terrifying restaurants even require their servers to wear name tags, but the rest of us hold our relative anonymity as one of the tenets of our professionalism and sanity. My name is for regulars who have come to know me, and for tables at the end of their meal, who want to talk to the higher ups about me, whether positively or negatively. 

When a server hears the table ask off the bat, “And your name is?” they know they're in for something.  The response to that question in polite society is, “Steve, what's yours?” At the table, however, it goes more like "Steve—[Whispers under breath.] what the fuck do you want to eat, asshole?”

The implication behind knowing a server’s name is that they now become easily attainable, and this breaks the rhythm that servers have with more trusting diners. Name-knowers no longer have to answer constant put-you-on-the-spot questions like, “Is there anything else I can get you?” because they are equipped with the knowledge of their servers’ names and the voice box that allows them to beckon one from their seat.

5. Asking for a Taste

One of the amazing things about wineries or Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory is that you get to taste everything. At dinner service, on the other hand, you should be more adept at choosing an appropriate option for yourself. If you don’t know wines very well, and the glass list sounds foreign to you, use the server’s brain and not her legs. By the time you're done tasting your way through reds, you will have forgotten what exactly you did or didn’t like about them and, on a busy night, just pushed your dinner back by about 15-30 minutes. 

Want to know how the soup tastes? Order it. Asking for a taste of it is like asking for a table in the kitchen and a tour of the walk-in. Can I watch the chefs for an hour and choose my favorite to cook my dinner? Deciding what you want at a restaurant can be hard when all the food sounds good, and it can be harder still when none of it catches your eye, but you have to choose.

If you live to be 80, you will eat at least 87,600 meals in your life. Just appreciate that you're privileged enough to get to eat, much less agonize over the choices. Don’t be scared, try new things, make mistakes—it really shouldn’t matter so much. Start a dialogue about what you’re having problems with and communicate with the people who can help you. Want a little of everything? Go to a fucking buffet.

4. Table Switching

If you don’t like your table, have the balls to say so. Don’t wait until your table becomes weighed down with drinks and your server is presenting the specials before you ask to sit at that one. Section lines are transparent, but hostesses have the special x-ray specs to see them, making them the best equipped to get you a table that won't interfere with reservations and your waitstaff’s mental health.  Most importantly, if you’ve been on a wait and are seated somewhere you don’t like and then a couple from a special table leaves, think about not jumping on it like it’s the last lifeboat to safety.

Having the table you want is a luxury dependent on the restaurant and the people in it. Ask first and be willing to accept no for an answer. You are not a unique snowflake to be put on display, you’re a person like everyone else, here for dinner, for company, to get out of the house, to people watch, to think and to feel—don’t let your table get in the way of that. And if the table really is the best part of the restaurant for you, start getting chummy with the managers and make a phone call before you head in. 

Photo by Cédric Leclère

3. Table Yelpers/Important Callers

This is a new one, and kind of amazing to have to talk about, but the phone junkies and over-sharers of the world must be made examples of. There is truly nothing sadder than watching someone write a Yelp review of the restaurant they’re currently sitting in. Most of the times that servers notice are when the customer seems a bit frustrated or put off by something (but refuse to admit anything is wrong). Then, when the server checks on them, they're typing the steam right out of their ears about how the waiter dude is just being, like, a total waiter dude, and how long everything takes (like, a whole game of words with friends for their entrees to come out) and how expensive everything is (a month’s worth of data charges), and how rude everyone seemed to be (probably because no one likes to serve someone who is on their phone the whole time), and how clearly this place doesn’t want any business acting they way they do (there's a pattern here). 

If you’re going to yelp about something, you should probably stay off the phone long enough to actually experience it. Then, you might even want to wait more than a few minutes to try and capture your meal in its totality. But, then again, this is the recipe for thought and careful expression, which has no place on the Internet and certainly not on Yelp.

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Important phone calls cannot be broken for long enough to acknowledge that someone not on the phone needs to interact with the person taking that important call. When someone comes in a building on the phone, you know that they're only half there (if that). When they won't pry the phone off their ear, even when ordering, when asking for an extra side of dressing, and when paying, they’ve led a ghost-like existence as a customer, almost to the point of not being one.

There aren't that many nuances to ordering food, but even the simplest divergence (an 86-ed entrée, a coursing concern) can tie the whole three-way conversation into an awful knot. This works the same way with tables who are so engrossed with their conversational dining partner that they block out the greetings and inquiries of their server until they have hit the punchline of their jokes, stories, and movie summaries. There is so much that servers are not allowed to assume and that is rude for them to ask about, but they will feel no remorse about not meeting the expectations of someone who can’t and won't hear what they’re saying.

2. Ignoring the Check

Servers may not like it when you linger in their section, because they are at work and are not paid by the hour. Some servers and restaurants are better than others about how luxuriously long your stay can be, but when a server drops a check, despite the fact that they tell you to take your time, they are dropping it because payment is due. Whether or not you stay and enjoy the ambiance of your post-prandial surroundings does not hinge upon whether or not you pay. If you pay the check, there is no timer that begins, counting down the minutes before the bouncers arrive to chuck you.  

Holding out false hope that you will order something else will fool no one, and sitting at a table and ignoring the check until you’re ignoring the closing time is unnecessary punishment for the slightest of conveniences. Pay the check. Hang around. Ask where you should be to continue enjoying the restaurant (you may just be surprised about how nice servers are to consdierate people). If you decide you want something else later, let someone know. Shifts are very often tiered, and while your server Juan was the one to take your order early in the night, another one, Juanita, or a bartender, Juan-Carlos, may be the one to help you when sooner turns into later.

1. Short Changing

This is cardinal-sin obvious and bad karma as well (to mix religions a bit). If you can’t be bothered to take a few minutes to set aside an appropriate tip, or even more heinously to double check that you left enough cash before you jet out the door to the stove you left on or the puppy you forgot to love, there are many words for you. Mistakes happen, people mean to tip more, mean to leave more, misunderstand their credit card slips, and it’s all forgivable on the whole. 

It’s unfortunate, it happens, everyone moves on. But you couldn’t hurt a server in any greater way. It’s not stealing in any modern sense of the word, but it is certainly something akin. It does not matter to a server that you meant to leave more (they'll never even know!). Take ten seconds from your conversation to use the math that the state forced on you all those years ago (or your iPhone) and pay for your goddamn dinner.