Restaurant Rage

Last winter, over the holidays, a restaurant manager I know clocked what she wryly calls the “Best Five Minutes Ever” of her career. Just seconds after punching in, she was called to the bar to break up a couple of brawlers. While showing one-half of the drunken duo to the door, she came across a couple of baddies dealing drugs in the entryway. Upon throwing all criminals out on the street, she was headed to the phone to call the cops, only to be sidetracked by a page instructing her to check out the men’s bathroom. Standing there in the middle of the restroom she found a guy, pants around his ankles, playing his own instrument, if you know what I mean. She had to literally pull up his pants so that she could usher him out without freaking out the diners.

Now, humility is a crucial quality for people who work in the hospitality industry; the notion that the guest is always right has been deeply ingrained within them. And as guests, most of us appreciate the service we are provided, and we express that gratitude with generous tips. Usually, this arrangement works out just fine, but there are exceptions to both sides of the deal. In recent years, in fact, it seems that I’ve been privy to more and more horror stories about diners. Maybe it’s because finishing schools and etiquette manuals are largely obsolete. Perhaps it’s due to “fine dining” being touted as a form of entertainment unto itself, thus raising the expectations of both staff and guests. Regardless, the upswing in ugly behavior has many restaurant workers questioning whether the guest is always right—and also wondering what the hell has gone wrong.

More from the local restaurant-worker pipeline: An older, affluent couple frequented a top steakhouse on a weekly basis, and they never failed to find something to complain about. The steak wasn’t cooked right, the wine smelled funny, the forks were poorly polished—whatever the problem was, they voiced their feelings, very loudly, to whichever server had been stuck with them. For a while, management went out of its way to appease the couple—moving their table, switching their server, pampering them with extra attention, and on occasion, a complimentary meal. Eventually it became clear that nothing would ever make this couple happy. A manager sincerely apologized for being unable to meet their high standards and politely suggested they find another restaurant. To everyone’s surprise, the pair kept coming. But from then on, they found everything to be fantastic.

Bad service should never be tolerated. If your food is cold, send it back. If your server was rude or inattentive, seek out a manager. No restaurant worth its salt wants you to suffer through a meal. Their goal is to have you leave happy and return later, credit card in hand. But a certain set of people seem determined to publicly humiliate or otherwise punish restaurant workers for service snafus. I theorize that these types are often asserting their version of a pecking order. People who spend days cowering in a cubicle to avoid an impossibly demanding boss—or, conversely, clawing their way to the top and stepping on many others in the process—are often all too delighted to blast anyone they perceive to be below them on the socioeconomic ladder.

Worse still, their chosen scapegoats are charged with the task of trying to please them. The worst offenders, outraged at the slightest mistake (say their Caesar salad arrived without chicken), demand justice. They declare their dining experience ruined, and expect their entire meal to be paid for. How would these people respond should a similar principle be applied to them in their work? Imagine a boss finding a typo in a certain status report and demanding that the offender forfeit a day’s pay as punishment. If this became the norm, employment litigation would sprout all over the place. Yet it seems to have become socially acceptable to belittle servers and bartenders, perhaps because they are mostly younger people whose work is not considered by some to be a “real job.” Never mind that restaurants in this country are a $1.3 trillion business that employs twelve-and-a-half million people—an employment force second only to the government.

Not surprisingly, booze plays no small role in this rash of bad behavior. Servers can be held liable if a drunk goes off and hurts someone, but the law that decreed this does not acknowledge how delicate a task it is to cut off inebriated people. Drunk people do not like being refused service; rich drunk people seem to like it even less so. Another recent story from the frontlines: A clean-cut man who’d been drinking was cut off and asked to leave an Uptown restaurant. After a short while he returned, claiming his sunglasses had been stolen. The manager threatened to call the cops and asked him to leave, but before he did so, the man responded by kicking her in the gut, leaving a boot-print.

Some restaurants are taking steps to ban anyone who behaves outrageously. But some good servers are also leaving the industry, tired of suffering the abuse. If this becomes a trend, owners will have to pay higher wages to less-experienced workers, which will only drive prices up and satisfaction down. It’s a bit of a conundrum. Owners and managers must make their guests happy, attempting to turn every complaint into an opportunity to create a guest for life; at the same time, they have to provide their employees with a safe and hospitable workplace.

But there’s reason for hope. Four out of every ten people have worked in a restaurant at some point in their lives. They can appreciate good service and sympathize with a mistake here and there. If they team up with current restaurant workers, maybe those diners with rage issues will eventually find themselves eating alone, at home.