The Quickest Way a Restaurant Loses My Business

When this happens to me, I don’t return

Photo by Roshan Chakkeeri on Unsplash

There aren’t a lot of things that GF Gerry and I do for entertainment, other than enjoy a good movie occasionally, a ball game, a small party with friends that ends at 8:00 p.m.

Hell, we’ve traveled all over the place in our separate younger lives, and now we find it enjoyable to just kick back and relax.

The one indulgence, besides the tame indulgences listed above, is we both enjoy going out to a nice restaurant. We take pleasure in treating ourselves to a good dinner, lunch, or breakfast.

But, oh, there’s one thing that we’ve discovered about restaurants that is really a turnoff.

And it happened again earlier this week.

We hadn’t seen Don and Jean for almost a month. We knew them from our mutual participation in a bocce league. The four of us, beginners in the sport, bonded over our combined incompetence.

Pretty much the oldest participants in our league, none of us had played the game before this newly formed group. The four of us learned how to play the game together — but on different teams.

Our respective sides battled each other last Wednesday night. We went out to dinner after the 6:00 p.m. game.

The restaurant was a mid-priced Italian place close to the bocce court.

The four of us walked on over to the nicely appointed establishment and scored a table in spite of the fact we didn’t have reservations.

The attractive young server immediately approached where we were sitting and took our drink orders.

We perused our menus while indulging in a bit of small talk and comparing what we could and couldn’t eat due to heath and diet restrictions. We matched our requirements with the offerings on the menu.

Like most sit-down restaurants, the menu tendered a few expensive ala carte selections. More in our financial wheelhouse were a large number of special dinners which came with soup or salad, an entree of some type of meat, pasta or potato, and a seasonal vegetable. Bread and butter was thrown in as well, and a choice of Jello or ice cream for dessert.

The specials gave you the most for your money — by far.

After a few minutes, our server approached our table ready to take our orders.

She started with Gerry, who has a self-imposed diet restriction of not eating carbs. She ordered the special consisting of salad, spaghetti and meatballs. Gerry asked the waitress if she could have a and if she could have just the meatballs and a green vegetable as a substitute for noodles. An obvious attempt to put a hold on the carbs.

“Sorry ma’am, no substitutions!” the waitress said firmly.

Hey, what happened to accommodating the customer? Isn’t that why you’re called a server?

Don who had been quiet until now, commented that he had diet restrictions due to doctor’s orders. Would the restaurant make an exception in his case?

“What might that be, sir?” queried the waitress.

The sole pizza on the specialty portion of the menu was pizza montanara, a pizza for the sophisticate Italian food connoisseur, where the pizza dough is first deep fried then popped into an oven after the marinara sauce, cheese and basil are added for the final touch.

A borderline diabetic, Don restricts his intake of sugary and fried foods.

He’s indulging himself a bit just by showing up in an Italian restaurant in the first place — but ya gotta let loose a little.

He simply asked the waitress if they would skip the deep frying and pop the pizza into the oven for cooking.

“No can do!” the server shot at Don.

No shrinking violet, Don mentioned that he’d like to be able to recommend this restaurant to his friends. However, the establishment’s rigid position on substitutions would cause him pause.

“I don’t make the rules around here,” the waitress exclaimed defensively.

We picked at the food when it came. Each of us enjoying it, but feeling guilty for ingesting something we were not supposed to eat.

It was an odd experience.

We left feeling filled physically but unfulfilled emotionally.

It may have been my imagination, but I thought I caught our waitress giving us the stink-eye when I was settling up at the front desk. The manager shoved the digital tip gizmo under my hand, you know the techie calculator that has the four boxes for the percent of tip: 15% — 20% — 25% — other.

I usually press the 25% but I hesitated tonight in that Italian restaurant.

I look at our server. She appeared to be still standing there defiantly.

Don’t shoot the messenger, I thought.

A Roman saying?

I checked the 25% box.

But Gerry and I never went back to that restaurant. I don’t know about Don and Jean.

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