It must be a bugger being a waiting person in a restaurant. There's little you can do about the rude and condescending customers, who are, after all, customers.
There's the ditherers, the loud, the over-fussy, the 'I need to go off-menu' etc. All part of life's rich tapestry...
And then there are people like me. Always polite (but not grovelling or over-familiar), generally warm, order well, tip reasonably.
I have developed a fussiness about water. My cousin suggested that I should just order tap water, I said that I often order mineral water for the same reason that he orders a glass of pop. Because it's the 'done thing' to order something. Besides, sometimes one orders tap water and it turns out to be not chilled and probably not even drinking water. My nephew said I was just fussy.
Ice in mineral water? Logically, why? A small bottle of mineral water can be as expensive as a glass of wine, and comes with ice-cubes made of...tap water. If my glass of wine came with frozen tap water, I would be justified, among my relations and the blogeristi, in exclaiming "That really is no way to serve a glass of wine!" So I ask for mineral water with no ice. It comes in a warm glass. Nephew still thinks I'm fussy. Other cousin believes the least one can expect is a not-warm glass.
And yet, subsequently, without prompting, I have been given the option..."Do you want ice?" in a restaurant I'd never been to before. And Saturday night, I specifically asked, "No ice" and the waiter looked at me surprised, saying "It's chilled." As it was. And it was pretty clear that it would have come without ice even if I hadn't stipulated.
Wine. Nothing quite beats the experience in Boston, USA when the bottle of chianti was served in an ice bucket. I mention it was Boston only because, when abroad, one is, or should be, conscious that local customs do not always match one's own. But later, the owner of the guesthouse assured us that ice-buckets with red was not a Boston tradition! Then there was the curry house on Rapid Hardware Street in Liverpool where five of us were dining and my then manager quickly decided to order five more bottles of red, at once, in the hope that by the time we got to the fifth it might just have lost the chill from being stored in a fridge.
I don't like it when waiters see your wine glass is nearly empty so refill it. Especially if it's white and the day, or the restaurant, is warm, I believe it's best to have little in the glass and to keep the rest in the bottle in the ice-bucket. I also like a sense of how much I'm drinking. If they refill, I drink more quickly and the logic goes, I'll order another bottle. But I'm not alone in wanting to pace or limit myself. If I drink at my speed I know subconsciously how drunk I will end up and when. And I almost always have the same number of units of alcohol during a meal out.
It's worse when they take the bottle away. I was in a posh Chinese restaurant with Edwin years ago. You know it was posh, because I got the menu without the prices. They took away the wine bottle, and occasionally returned to top up my glass. I found it impossible to judge how much I had been drinking until too late. I suspect Edwin ordered another bottle in my absence; being the old-fashioned gentleman, he would be of the view that discretion is everything. This restaurant was genuinely posh and Edwin is the perfect gentleman, but being older, wiser and more cynical now, I would insist that the wine bottle stayed in my sight throughout.
Interesting that one gets to taste the first bottle. This isn't so that you can decide whether you like it. It's to confirm it's what you ordered. Not that I could by taste alone. Mainly it's to confirm that the wine is potable, that it hasn't corked. I've noticed this immediately twice at home. I've never had the problem with proper wine in a proper restaurant. In pubs and fast-food places, I've been unable to determine whether it's adequate wine that's gone off or just crap wine.
My main annoyance is hovering. When they ask "Is everything all right?" I'm tempted to reply "If it wasn't, you'd know by now." Or "It was until you interrupted my flow of conversation and my thought process." But I don't. It's that polite thing. Sometimes very irritating: you are trying to concentrate on the food or on your companion(s) and you're constantly mithered. It seems to be an increasing irritant. I'm not at a restaurant to entertain the staff, nor to listen to what their day's been like.
We tried a local Portuguese recently. Never again. the food was fine, except that the fish dish we ordered contained chorizo and did not say so on the menu. I assume that a genuine Portuguese person would know instinctively it would but that isn't good enough in 21st century England. That would have been forgivable but they played loud hip-hop music all evening. I looked around. I think I was the youngest person in there. Most of the customers were white but the late middle-aged black couple did not look like hiphop fans. It might be what the staff wants, but in a restaurant in Goa I complained about the unmelodious over-loud dance-trance music (vintage circa 1992 with a pounding beat). I was told with a shrug "The Russians asked for it." I stated firmly that it was music for drug-users and -dealers and within moments the music changed to Tchaikovsky, and the Russians left. I must remember the drug-users and dealers one again (I'm so full of bullshit) because no restaurant anywhere can afford that perception.
Dining out is one of the great pleasures in life, and with the right circumstances and the right companion(s) there's little I like to do more. It's great to see how restaurants have improved in their quality and variety during my lifetime, and it's wonderful to know so many good, independently-owned unfashionable restaurants in often surprising places that offer so much. If only they'd get the details right...
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