To rant or not...? Rant I shall
(I apologise in advance for any grammatical errors in this post. It was written in a hurry and I was very angry.)

wiredforlife once told me that I should start a blog like Waiter Rant, chronicling the crazy things that I encounter in my job, running a restaurant.

At the time, I replied that while I'd love to, there wasn't much chance I could keep my identity secret. After all, there aren't too many South-east Asian restaurants in Bangalore, and even if I wrote under an assumed name, I know quite a few people who could put two and two together and figure out it was I who was ranting. And it's not good PR to badmouth customers, even the nasty ones.

Not that we get too many of the nasty ones, of course. Most of the people who walk in through my door are very nice people, and indeed some 70% of my business comes through repeat customers and word-of-mouth (judging from feedback forms). When you're dealing with thousands of people served in a month, and several thousand dishes cooked, however, even 1% probability events happen often enough to be memorable. Statistically, the following are guaranteed to happen:

1) We screw up in the kitchen and make food that doesn't fit usual standards
2) We screw up on the service
3) Some batshit-insane customer dines at our place and makes life hell for us for no fault of ours

So with a probability of just 1% (with humans, it's closer to 5% even at the best of places), you're still looking at 30 crazy customers when you're feeding 3000 customers a month (for instance.)

I'm fanatical about service standards, and I have gone to great lengths to resolve customer issues in the past. (To avoid tooting my own horn, I won't go into details here.) But as I wrote earlier, once in a while you'll get this total nutjob customer who will say or do something so crazy that it will make me fiercely stick up for my people. It's where I will draw the line at "the customer is always right". A customer like that is not worth the trouble he creates, and I don't particularly care if he or she never comes back.

Which is why I feel the need to rant about Mr. N who had dinner with his family at Shiok.



I first noticed the commotion at the table when I was standing near the cashier desk, talking to my General Manager about some administrative issues and surveying the place, as I usually do when I'm at work. I heard the Mr. N (the father) raising his voice about something. I immediately turned around and saw that the waiter seemed to be clearing an empty plate at the table. From what I could figure out, Mr. N was very upset over this. He was loudly demanding to know why the waiter was clearing the plate, and then started ranting about how our service standards were very poor. He didn't just stop at a sentence or two. He just kept going.

What did we do wrong? For the life of me, I can't figure it out. The lady whose plate was being cleared had finished every morsel on her plate, had kept her cutlery in the "I'm done" position (parallel on the plate, pointing up), and there was no food left to serve. The waiter did as he was supposed to - he put his hand out, palm up, near the plate, said "excuse me" to the lady (who apparently nodded, says the waiter), and he was picking up the plate when Mr. N blew his top. And according to him, the waiter was supposed to clear the empty plates on the table only when everyone on the table had finished eating. (Um no, Mr. N, that's not what they teach you at hotel management school).

Well, even if this was some screw-up on our end (which it wasn't), the reaction was hardly proportionate to the magnitude of the problem, so I found it weird that Mr. N kept ranting about it. Having shouted enough at the waiter, he then summoned the captain to his table, and gave him a good dose of his anger. The captain, having realised that there was no point arguing about it, quickly apologised. "Alright sir, I'm sorry about that,” I saw him saying to the guest. You'd think that this would be enough for Mr. N. But noooooo! He then got angry at the captain, shouting that his "curt reply" was rude (all he did was say "sorry"), and then kept going about how we would lose all our customers if we stuck to these standards of service.

He wasn't done. He then ranted about this had happened to him in Mainland China and Three Quarter Chinese too, and how all the restaurants in bloody Bangalore (his words) were useless at service. Phew!

All this because a waiter had cleared an empty plate.

Mr. N finally stopped, and 2 minutes later, Junior N, perhaps trying to prove his manhood, once again summoned the captain and repeated pretty much what his dad said. It was getting insane, and I was tempted to intervene and be a little stern with the man, but I refrained.

I pulled one of the waiters aside and asked, "Noel, what the hell is wrong over there?"
"The guest has been cranky since he sat down, sir. The same thing happened earlier when I was clearing the lady's empty virgin pina colada glass. There was nothing left in the glass except a small bit of froth on the rim, but she asked me why I was clearing the glass and then said she wasn't done with it. So I put the glass down again.” Noel said.

After finishing with Noel, I looked towards the table and saw Mr. N continuing his rant, this time with the GM. I couldn't believe that this man was so agitated over a relatively trivial issue like this. Was he drunk? I checked the order tickets for the table, and saw that he had only had one large Bacardi, so I'm putting it down to some other issues instead. He then went on about how a "sorry" was not enough to fix things, and told the GM to go see what we were going to give him complimentary to make up for our mistake.

You'd think this was the end of it, but you'd be wrong. When he was leaving, the man made a big noise over more issues. Issues like...

* A slight printer paper alignment problem that caused the “Bacardi” in the bill to creep up into the black band on the bill where the field headers are (Item, quantity, price, etc.). Everything was charged correctly, mind you. He then said he wasn't going to pay for the Bacardi because he didn't have it. (Poppycock!)

* Duplicate copy of the credit card charge-slip. The carbon customer copy is printed on blue paper. Mr. N was terribly unhappy with this, and tossed it angrily at the cashier, saying he couldn't read it. (Need to get those eyes checked, amigo.)

He kept yelling at the staff even as he was leaving, abusing the captain and saying things like "I will fucking screw your happiness" and "I will cut you into pieces". When the captain told him, "Sir, please don't get wild", he got even more livid, asking who he was to tell him not to get wild.

He then demanded the boss's number (odd, given that I was standing right there most of the time), which the captain said he didn't have. As he was leaving, the GM asked for his card, and Mr. N said he would give his card only if he got an apology letter in writing first. He finally gave his card, with a stern word that he expected the boss to call him the next day to apologise for the actions of the staff.

I apparently have to call him to apologise for... clearing an empty plate and an empty glass.

As if.

He can kiss my arse. I don't want guests like that in my restaurant.


B'bye, Mr. N. Please don't come back. We certainly won't miss you.

PS: Junior apparently said something about how he had emailed me before, and that he would send me an email again. I'm waiting for it so I can tell him to fuck off. (I checked my archives and don't see anything with his name, so I have no idea what he's talking about.)