I spent a lot of my youth working in restaurants, so I love the amazing and miserable tales of bad customers that are featured on
Jezebel's food blog Kitchenette each Monday. (It is SUCH the sort of thing we occasionally do so well.)
Q: Do you have any nonacademic blogs you read that approximate the misery and smackdown of ours?
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Oh, people are clamoring for some "flava," especially because Reg's note is food related. Someone, I won't say who, HIRAM, wrote, "Do you get it? Flava? Both ways? The way we use it, but also flavor, because it's food?" Hiram thinks I'm an idiot.
Anyway, from Kitchenette's "Behind Closed Ovens" feature from today and linked above:
One busy Saturday night, a crowd of about 20-30 people suddenly came in. My friend thought one of his coworkers was kidding when he said a woman in a wedding dress was among them. Then he looked up, and sure enough, there’s a woman in a wedding dress, a groom, bridesmaids, groomsmen, and a bunch of well-dressed people. Yep, it was a wedding party.
Needless to say, the bar was crowded and all the seats taken. Somehow, the wedding party seemed surprised by this, and one older man (father of the bride, maybe) came to complain to the manager, basically telling him he should make some of the customers move so that they could get enough tables for the wedding party. The manager refused, saying he could not/would not make paying customers move, and asked why the wedding party hadn’t made a reservation. The guy’s response? “Who makes a reservation at a bar?!”
Of course by now the whole place was staring at the wedding party in disbelief and amusement. Some of the men in the wedding party headed over to some of the tables in what my friend guessed was an effort to guilt them into moving, which failed, as most of the tables proceeded to order rounds of drinks or more food.
Up next comes the angry bride, who demanded to know why they were still serving “those people” when it was her wedding day. The manager explained that they are paying customers, and he would not force them to move. The bride then accused the staff of “ruining her wedding.” The manager again asked about why they didn’t make a reservation. The bride started crying, saying that “it’s not fair,” yadda yadda yadda.