That dinner out where everything that could go wrong, does go wrong? Yes. That one. The dining out nightmare. This little gem took place last night and it’s simply too good not to share.
Dining Out Nightmare
I receive the spontaneous come-join-us-for-dinner-out invite text from a good friend. An unexpected meal out with her and her husband and their lovely daughters? Yes, please.
I arrive at their home within the hour. After Mr. Charming Host (MCH) books the reservation in the car we zip off for the 25 minute trip into town. The five of us are in great form. We catch up on the news of the week; the highlight being the 11th birthday party of the youngest member.
Things take a turn the second we arrive.
“There’s no record of your reservation, sir. Are you sure it is this restaurant that you booked?”
Uh yes. While this popular steakhouse chain boasts several locations within a close radius it’s this restaurant that the booking was made. It’s close to MCH’s office and parking garage. It’s the one he always goes to. So yes, he’s sure it is this restaurant, thank you very much.
Ok. A lost reservation isn’t a unique concept, right? Wrong. The hostess calls in the manager who proceeds to contact every other member restaurant within the vicinity. Very earnestly. And very theatrically. He hangs up the phone with the face of a mortician.
“Your reservation is nowhere in our system sir.”
As he babbles on about how he’s been working since 3:00, we take a quick gander of our surroundings. It’s not busy but there are lots of servers. Surely he could just seat us in a quiet corner somewhere?
“Have a seat in the bar. We’ll get you sorted.”
We’re led to a high table equipped with bench seating on one side and high chairs on the other. Birthday girl A (BGA) is happy to sit on the end. However the hostess has other ideas. With much strenuous shoving she joins a second table to ours. We’ve got seating for 12 with BGA stranded out in the boonies. But no worries. It’s temporary.
Overworked manager boy returns.
“We still can’t find that reservation. As we’re so heavily booked tonight I can offer to put you in an awkward corner which no one would like or you could stay here. Your other option is to be seated at 9:00.”
9:00? It’s now 6:30. Two and a half hours of boozing isn’t conducive to any of us. We choose to eat in the bar with some alterations to the seating arrangement and the placatory offer of complimentary appetizers.
With the manager’s oft-repeated “we’re heavily booked tonight” interrupting our conversation and our table restored to its original configuration we tuck into our appies, ever mindful of that imminent influx of diners. They’ll have to sashay past our humble group on route to the off-limits-to-us-dining room.
It hasn’t happened by 7:00. All remains deathly silent in that cherished room so the anticipated group must be huge. Perhaps they’re arriving by coach and are held up at the border.
No matter. The hearty Malbec and yummy appies are restorative. The reservation hiccough is fading.
And then the main courses arrive.
One of our party is living with gluten and dairy issues so she’s carefully selected her meal. Unfortunately it arrives decidedly overcooked and quite inedible. Big mistake. Huge. She’s a seasoned server at a popular local restaurant and knows the drill. She politely shares her disappointment of the cooked-to-the-point-of-shoe-leather meal with our server.
The manager pops in for yet another visit. His solution of a replacement steak is graciously declined in favour of more vegetables; the 20 minute meat redo isn’t enticing. Her meal is now comped.
“Jesus. At this rate, our whole dinner will be free!” observes MCH.
His wife and I can only nod. Having both ordered the Blackened Manhattan – steak advertised as “coated with select herbs and spices and finished with herb butter” – we’re occupied with some serious chewing. Both of our deliciously seasoned steaks are also excessively overcooked. We silently agree it’s not worthy of another managerial consult.
It’s now 8:30 and we’re positively puzzled. The restaurant is still awaiting that onslaught of diners. Our section is quiet, the dining room is dead.
It’s mercifully dessert time.
Not relishing a night of caffeine induced insomnia I blithely order my standard after dinner drink. Mint tea.
A voice hisses in my ear.
“We can’t seem to find any mint tea. Anywhere! We’re still looking but I’m not sure if we’ll be able to locate one.”
Silly me. How could I have ordered something so audaciously rare? And on a night that they’re so heavily booked?
The ubiquitous complimentary birthday cheesecake is produced for BGA. It’s huge and could easily serve 10. She manages to work her way through half of it. It’s a shame the rest of us are watching our caloric intake.
We’ll be dining out on this story for weeks. Just not at that particular restaurant.
Should you happen to encounter the cherished yet still missing diners, could you do me a favor? Please alert them to the fact that there’s still plenty of cheesecake and virtually no lineups for the washroom.
Enough about me and my dining out nightmare. I’m curious about you. Have you ever had such a splendidly eventful dining experience? If so, have no reservations in providing details. I’m getting used to it! If you’d care to share, I’d love to hear.
48 Responses
Ha ha ha! I find that dining out on Sundays is always an adventure. I think the regular manager and crew get that day off and it’s left to the second-stringers to sort everything out. The only dining nightmare I can recall is when my daughter, then 3, hurled all over me and her and the floor at a local bar and grill. On the one hand, we were getting ready to leave. On the other hand, that meant she upchucked on our winter coats, which were quite laborious to wash. Good times, good times.
Oh poor wee thing. And poor you! Hope you managed to get it all out of the coats without too much trouble. Nothing like that aroma. And I agree with you on the Sunday night second-stringers front. We certainly seemed to have been gifted with the B or perhaps the C team.
Oh man, we have certainly had our fair share. Most recently at a restaurant we have frequented quite often making not only us wait over an hour (closer to two hours) to eat our barely edible meal, but our kids, too. Seriously, most waiters know the drill (even if we hadn’t asked) that you bring the kids their food first and try not to make them wait longer then their attention span. So, like you we definitely have talked about this quite often and don’t think we will be going back there anytime soon, as well.
Oh Janine isn’t that the worst? Waiting and waiting with hungry kids. Come on. Seriously. Bring them their food! Let me know if you do decide to go back and how it went. I’ll go to another restaurant in the chain but not that one. At least not any time soon.
Oh Kelly I am filled with irritation at snooty hosts and servers! San Francisco and surrounds are notorious (I mean famous) for that “oh dear” attitude: how can you possibly think you can dine here without a reservation? we can’t seat you until your whole party is present and accounted for… And my favorite: you have CHILDREN? Let me stick you in this filthy corner by the bathrooms and dirty dishes, and you can watch the flies buzz around the leftovers.
They make eating out such a stressful experience. My grandmother used to click in wonder that we’d want to spend money on these experiences and I’m beginning to agree with her!
Sigh. I’m going to make myself a cup of mint tea to calm down. Thank you for your sense of humor always!
You’ve reminded me of the dinners I’d experience with my best pal years ago before we were both married. We always got seated near the kitchen. It was extraordinary. I guess the concept of two women dining out together was novel. One time they even brought us our main course before we’d finished our appies. We weren’t lingering over the appies but pleasantly eating our way through them as we chatted. Well. That was it. We stood our ground and asked for the mains to be returned to the kitchen. It was a shame the doors were closed as we couldn’t see if they were spat upon… That mint tea still hot? I’ll be right over.
I guess I’m lucky, because I can’t think of any dining out nightmares. Either they haven’t happened, or I’ve managed to remove them from my memory 🙂
You are blessed Kathy! Can I come out to dinner with you?
Any time! Promise not to jinx anything?
Ooohhh now that’s a difficult thing to promiss as quirkiness follows me like a shadow …
So sorry to hear of your exciting night out turned disappointing, Kelly.
Having worked for half of my high school and much of my college years in restaurants (mostly as a waitress – was a lousy {service} bartender at a very high end restaurant too – learned a lot about attitudes there), the behind the scenes stories are, sadly, more scarey than your customer nightmare.
Still, I don’t have a lot of patience for poor service (but understand what happens in the kitchen is not the server’s fault, even though they usually shoulder the blame). A good server (or host/hostess) can make you feel great about a bad meal. A bad one can ruin the best gastric experience.
Tell them to take shoe leather off the menu. I’m sure your fellow future customers will appreciate the intervention :-).
Thank you for putting a different perspective on the whole experience Nanette. I did feel very sorry for the poor server having to admit that they couldn’t track down a mint tea (they did in the end as we were ready to go). Now I am picturing her trying to pass that task off to someone else. “Noooooo! I can’t go back to that table and tell them anything else…” Poor girl. Not her fault – she was just the messenger. As for the shoe leather concept – thank you. I’ll get on that.
Sorry to hear that your night out was such a let down. It is so disappointing to have such terrible service. Hope your next dinner out is memorable in a good way !
I’m sure it will be Jane. Can’t be much worse. However, it was really not as horrible as perhaps I made it sound. Everyone in our party took it in their stride and with great humour as the night unfolded. I am very curious though about the diners that never showed up. “We’re very booked up…” is the new line. Odd as there were lots of wait staff just standing around.
I don’t think I’d have missed the opportunity to bite the hand that fed me if the steak was a burnt offering. You pay good money to dine out, it needs to be worth it. Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes I say 😀
One incident of dining out comes to mind. Three work friends and I went out to dinner at a well known steakhouse. Entree was passable. When main arrived, one of my friends had additional protein in her tossed salad in the form of a cockroach. Of course it could only have been Linda it happened to. Linda, whose home is spotless, whose work station is always tidy. I have to say, I felt sorry for the young server, she had no idea of what to do. Apparently cockroaches weren’t a common component of the tossed salad. The Alpha member of our group, Jacquie (incidentally, also our team leader at work) was somewhat less reticent than Linda. Sarcasm combined with wit are Jacquie’s forte. Linda decided to forgo a replacement meal and declined dessert. The rest of us decided dessert should not be missed and as the server walked away with our order, Jacquie called out to her in voice that caused all diners’ ears to prick up, “Oh and we’ll have dessert without cockroaches this time please.” Ahhh, so much fun 😀
Absolutely grinning ear to ear here Lyn. After the initial cringe of course. If I was there we would have witnessed new meaning to the term Tossed Salad. Yuck! But the fact that is was served to little ms. tidy is the icing on the cake. Oh man. She must have been horrified. You’ve reminded me of the time I was eating out with my boss and the server presented the bill with an additional item. As Sue reached for it a cockroach popped up waving his little antenae in hello. We’d finished our meal so there wasn’t much in the way of compensation offered.
Wow – I can’t believe that they made such a big deal about being heavily booked and then it never got full – I would have had all kinds os snarky comments because…..Sounds like the food wasn’t even great but at least you had good company!!!
The company made the meal Kim. We are all story tellers too so I think this story will take a lonnnnggggg time to dine … I mean die.
I can’t think of any stories off the top of my head – but it sounds like your party were good sports and had a great evening anyway. You could serve me that dessert in the back alley and I’d be happy!
Dessert in the back alley? Now there’s a concept I could get onboard with. And yes, my pals took it all in stride. We were positively grinning when the poor server announced they were trying to track down the mint tea. Perhaps it was a case of “of course, we’re out to dinner with Kelly. Just typiKel.”
When things start to go south in a restaurant I am so certain that my husband will make every f@#k up within a three-mile radius (rightfully) miserable, that I immediately start to tap dance and use jazz hands as I bust into “Everything is Awesome” (from the Lego movie.) It’s like, I don’t mind the fact that everything has gone wrong so much as I hate the impending confrontation. Ack! (And I’m allergic to everything… the amount of food I should have sent back could feed a country in Africa.)
Such a cringe-able night!! (Good thing BGA got such good cake.)
Funny. I’m like that as well – I really don’t like the impending confrontation either. I was expecting my host to react but he didn’t. It was quite marvelous. The only sign was a pair of raised eyebrows and an unexpressed “Realllyyyyyyy?!?” On another note – I’m also not a fan of silence and usually fill it with all sorts of non sequiturs. However, lately I’ve made a concerted effort to NOT fill the silence and sit there with mouth tightly clamped. It’s hard but I’m learning.
Sorry about your allergies. That must be hard.
I can’t think of anything off hand that happened anywhere like this – I’m sure reading this was much more enjoyable to me that sitting through it all was to you – however, you seemed to take it ever so stoically! It’s amazing the restaurant never filled up – I think I would have confronted them on that one!
I know. However I think we were all just finished by the point we left. Not worth the effort. The poor servers were more than aware of our feelings. The manager? Incapable of discerning it I suspect.
I’m reminded of the time that a rather largish group of myself and other weavers arrived at a local beach hangout with limited seating. We had it all figured out. Went out on the deck and simply pushed every available table into the center, making a pleasant design of the various shapes of the tables, and scattered chairs randomly. Management was not impressed with our creativity and demanded that we wait in the lobby. Management then put the tables back in place, strode into the lobby and informed us that our tables on the deck were now ready. We took our seats and as soon as the amused waiters left, once again put the tables back into our original design. Two times Management attempted to put those tables back, but weavers know about tenacity. We won.
Oh you have me grinning Linda. I love this. Good on you guys. Well done. What on earth was the management worried about?
I have many dining disaster stories…but one appropriate for the upcoming season, I think.
Every year at Eastertide, the Minnesota Scientifiction Society puts on Minicon, a convention for speculative fiction fans. For many of those years, it’s been at one particular hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota. Back in the 1980s, it was a huge convention with thousands of people.
Next to the hotel was a family-dining restaurant. As it happened, one year a new manager took over the place about two months before Easter. He did not know about Minicon, and did not listen to the long time employees who tried to warn him.
So Sunday morning, I go in for breakfast, and the waitress was nearly weeping. No eggs, no chicken, no milk; they were rapidly running out of coffee and orange juice; and the manager had not budgeted buying enough extra food, so they couldn’t just have someone make a grocery store run. That manager got fired.
Oh my! What a horror show Scott. It must have been so very difficult for the wait staff and I bet they also remember it to this day. Thank you for sharing.
The restaurant is long gone; there’s a TGIFridays in roughly that spot; they’ve never failed to coordinate with the hotel for big conventions.
Smart.
You know, that really irks me. “We’re so overbooked…” Yeah, OK. There is a place my sister and I like to go for dinner and every time we call for a reservation, they are delighted to tell me that they are so full with openings only at this time or earlier or this time or later – never the time we want – and when I say “oh, but I was hoping for this…” they suddenly manage to find that one table.
And you know what?
When we arrive, the dining room is always nearly empty. I don’t get it. At. All. It’s become my life’s mission to figure out why they do this.
Dining out is such fun…
Yes go and find out what that’s all about, Lisa. Quite something. Is it a case of “we’re so popular but we might just be able to squeeeeeze you in” I wonder?
That is most definitely one of my top theories, Kelly.
Also, I think because three of their walls are store-front windows on a busy historic main street, they want to have people in the window seats at all times. So they only fill those spots, then the others as sort of a second-string option.
Oh that makes sense – that they want the window seats full. Hmmmm….
Great story Kelly- I think we can all substitute different names in the story and make it our own. Amazing that you can laugh about it now!
Oh bt we were laughing throughout, Sue. It just kept getting better and better.
Oh my goodness…what a hoot! I am reminded of the time a large group of us went out to dinner at an upscale restaurant and at the end of our meal we all wanted to order dessert. We had come in for a late dinner, after attending an event, so by this time it was a few minutes until closing. We were informed by the manager, after the server had taken our orders, that basically it was just too much trouble as it was late and all the deserts were frozen anyway. Can you believe that? Well, he and I had a few words and a few minutes later dessert was on the table and it was free and miraculously not frozen!….LOL…
Oh you are good Debbie Goode! I am grinning here over the fact that dessert was delivered and not frozen and free! Well done you.
Oh yes. Like the time when our order was never placed with the kitchen — and we were the only diners in the restaurant. Or the time when I ordered gluten-free pasta, right off the menu, and we’re pretty sure the chef had to leave the building, go shopping for pasta at a specialty store, and then return just in time to boil it to a gummy mass and slip it on our table a mere hour after we’d ordered.
I feel for you. I feel for you.
BTW, that is the biggest piece of cheesecake I have ever seen in my life. I think it is bigger than an entire cheesecake would be, truly a feat of modern physics.
I know! We felt the same way. She is 11. She ate maybe half of it. Such a silly waste. With three of us trying to stay away from caloric desserts (this number must have topped out at a mere 3409) and the other allergic to dairy we thought she did very well.
An hour after you ordered? Wowza. And it was a mushy mess. Not good. I’ve only once had my order not placed and that was another night from hell. When they finally brought me my salmon it was shoe leather. SO overcooked I had to send it back. Left no tip.
While my daughter was in college we went to visit her one year to celebrate her birthday. We invited a bunch of her friends for brunch at a famous chain restaurant that rhymes with Beescake Bactory. Thankfully I have blocked most of the details from memory but do remember enough to feel your pain. I’m glad the Malbec helped a little bit!
Oh Mo you do make me smile. Beescake Bactory. I’ll remember to give it a miss. And yes. That Malbec was just the ticket.
Most awkward dinner out in recent memory wasn’t actually the restaurant’s fault. It was my weirdo parents, in town for last Thanksgiving. I cooked and prepped breakfast options for them, but was told plainly (we’re a blunt family), “I don’t eat that.”
So my husband and I suggested a diner down the road. When the waitress asked about the check my father waved her off – “Just one check.”
Were we wrong to assume this meant he was paying?
Apparently yes. Because when the bill came he didn’t reach for it. Minutes passed. My husband, a saint among men, reached for it and paid without comment, for our meals, my adult brother’s, and my parents’.
It was very strange.
No! That is extraordinary. Sounds like you married the gem of gems.
I’ve read this post several times (and it has produced chuckles each time!) – but I am only now getting a second to comment. This article has convinced me that the life you lead is truly “Just Typikel!” Still sort of worried about those missing diners …. do you think they ever got to eat?!
Grinning over the “Just TypiKel…” yep. My life is anything but dull. Always something. As for the diners, well I was talking about it with my fellow diner and we think that maybe these guys never existed. Maybe management didn’t want to open up the big menu that night? We had to choose from the smaller bar menu … I’d like to think that’s the reason.