re: What’s the latest it’s considered “polite” to show up to a restaurant before close?

An hour before closing time is the unofficial actual closing time for actual sit down restaurants. A standard meal can take an hour so that puts you actually walking out before the hard close.

I worked in a restaurant for a few years along time ago fwiw

Showing up in the final hour ensures you will get really shitty food and service too. You'll get old fries and bread, they aren't dropping anything new.

We have a restaurant here, Crechale's, that has a policy it doesn't close til the last person leaves.

Another thing is that if the restaurant had a bar, a well run place that’s slow that night will have the guests sit in the bar as the bartender usually is the last front of the house to leave and the most closing duties.

Now, this is for smaller parties of 4-6 or less. A huge group showing up at closing no one in the restaurant is happy outside of the druggie server that’s late on bills or needs a last minute cash tip to buy their drugs after work

As a cook, I don’t really mind a couple two-tops or three-tops rolling in up until close. What drives me nuts are late parties that don’t call ahead and then get pissed, stiff the servers and/or write a review about how we ruined your cousins birthday because half the menu had already been 86’d for the night.

We don’t fire, prep, or staff on the off chance that a random twelve-top walks in 15 minutes before close on a weeknight. Doing that would mean wasting food and labor most nights, because nine times out of ten it doesn't happen.

If you’re coming in with a group, you should really always call ahead, but if you’re planning to show up within an hour of close, it’s not just polite, it gives the restaurant a chance to actually be ready to serve you instead of setting everyone up for a bad experience.

Nah, black dude. He used to have billboards around Gonzales, so I’m guessing the church was somewhere in Ascension.

The Swags just sucked at tipping. I had a friend who got stiffed on his last night and chased them outside, threw the change at them, and told them to go frick themselves. I hope he is a powerful attorney now.

And as always in these threads, I have to point out that the public wildly overestimates how often cooks spit in or otherwise frick with food. As a disclaimer, I’ve never worked at Burger King or Denny’s, so I can’t speak for that end of the spectrum. But if you’re eating at a halfway reputable place, there’s almost zero chance anyone has touched your food in a malicious way.

Believe it or not, most professional chefs and line cooks take as much pride in what they put out as you do in your own work. Even when a customer is annoying, the line doesn’t turn into a revenge fantasy. People want the plate to be right, clean, and done properly, because that’s the job and because our professional reputation matters to us even if the public perception is that we're degenerate dirtbags (which, while mostly true, doesn't carry over to sabotaging our own work).

Also, if you're an average polite person you are vastly overestimating how annoying you are and underestimating how annoying some other people are. Chances are you didn't even get noticed by the kitchen.

Like I said, it really is about "reading the room". If a place closes at 10PM and its 9:05PM and there are only two tables occupied and the staff appears to be in "closing time" mode I am going to go elsewhere unless a waiter or manager insist I eat there.

I am just not someone who thinks "I am here willing to spend my money they should just be happy I came".

Plus, I don't want someone who is pissed they have to prepare a meal, to prepare my meal. No telling what they will do to your food.

This was a long time ago, but my brother was a busboy at a local place and after he quit he told us things that were done. There was 1 day of the week they served spaghetti and they were always busier than normal on that day. And from time to time there would be people who would call in a pick up order like 10 mins before closing time.

They would get mad because their manager would never tell anyone the kitchen was closing up so if they already started to pick up/clean up, the dude who had to put together the to go orders would add dishwater to the order (I don't know how or how much or what. He just said the dude would mix in dishwater in the spaghetti).

He said one time this guy who would go in every week to get spaghetti.. He was one of the people who was late one week, when he came back the following week he ordered something else and told the waitress "I need to give the spaghetti a break. Last week it messed my stomach up".

That sticks in your head to never go to a restaurant near closing time. And I don't even know how accurate that story is. It might have been one of those stories someone heard from someone else then tells it in the first person. But when it comes to food, I try to be really nice to the people who might have influence over the people who prepare it.