Mouthing Off | How do you react to bad restaurant service? Are you calm, a complainer or a full-blown Karen? How a recent meal out ended in fireworks
- A busy restaurant can be a disaster if the staff aren’t professional. Most diners will get annoyed if they have to wait too long for their meals
- Recently we ate in a restaurant with overwhelmed staff, and saw the full range of reactions to late food, and mistakes on bills
What do you do when you get really bad restaurant service?
There are self-absorbed jerks who regularly complain over minor matters, like not getting a wedge of lime with their sparkling water or a steak not being the exact shade of pink they want.
That’s not what I’m talking about. Generally, I try to be very forgiving. Hospitality is a thankless task. Most servers work way harder than you think. Oversights and mistakes happen because we’re all human and they’re usually fixed with an abundance of apologies.
However, disasters do occur.
On a recent holiday weekend, my partner and I decided at the last minute to watch the Chinese National Day fireworks over Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. Without a reservation, we resigned ourselves to a quick casual bite in any nondescript eatery.
