re: Contacting a restaurant for bad service..

quote:

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I've had one truly awful experience. If I met anymore with more than a few, I'd immediately think the problem is them.. not the restaurants. You don't want to come off as one of those people

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I guess it depends on what your definition of awful experience is. I have had several. I had one when I had some family in town and we went to an expensive restaurant and we had an awful waiter who was completely unprofessional the whole time. My wife asked him if something came with sides and he said "No sweetheart, I'm going to take you to the cleaners there", implying that they are going to charge us for everything. He said "right on" for everything, which is douchey. Then he forgot one of our orders. We all ordered the same thing basically (Artista's in Houston is famous for the "Churrasco" steak) and he miscounted and shorted us one. We told him and he said oh yeah it's coming right out. 10 minutes later it hadn't come out. I asked him again for the last steak and he said yeah its coming and I said "Ok, this is just a little crazy". He basically went off on me for saying it was a little crazy that the steak was taking 40 minutes to get to the table. I had a manager come over and very professionally explained the entire situation to the guy. Never raised my voice. Never cursed. Just told him what the guy did. He offered to give everyone at the table a free drink, free desserts and comped the steak that took so long to arrive. I gladly accepted all of those things. I would never have expected to pay for that steak.

Also had an experience at Morton's steakhouse where I ordered a steak medium rare and it was raw. I will typically eat an undercooked steak because it doesn't bother me, but this one was really bad. I'm paying $55 for a steak, it should be at least CLOSE to what I ordered. When the waiter came by and asked how everything was I said "Look I absolutely hate to do this, but this is not cooked enough, would you mind throwing it back on the grill for a few minutes. That dude like didn't talk to us for the rest of our time in Morton's (we were pretty young, like 22 I think, but we look young). He didn't even refill our wine glasses when we ordered a bottle of wine (one of those places that takes your bottle from the table) and didn't offer us dessert. Again, I politely asked the manager to come to the table and explained the situation to him and the fact that I wouldn't expect our waiter to give us the cold shoulder for the rest of the meal because I asked him nicely to cook my steak a little longer. The manager said the whole meal was on him. Obviously, I accepted.

We are NEVER rude to a server and I always tip more than 20% at a nice restaurant like the above places if the service is decent, but I will more than happily accept something if stuff is really fricked up like that.