Restaurant Customers Who Were the Devil, Part 1

My former brother-in-law, who was a seller of “what fell off the back of the truck” merchandise, if you know what I mean, involved my entire family in some epic restaurant bullshit. This Fucking Guy [insert Jean-Luc Picard meme image here] once sold the trees on an empty lot adjoining his office, where he “worked” in “leasing”, to a timber company. They came out and cut down and hauled away all the trees. Did he own the lot? No, no he did not.

Anyway, it was the 70’s and I was a little kid, the youngest of a family of six, most having several children—so, a big group. Former Brother In Law invited everyone to a family dinner at Black Angus, his treat in honor of my parents’ anniversary. The day before, his wife, my sister (not exactly in the top ten of my favorite people either), came over to my parents’ house, hysterical. FBiL didn’t have any money to pay for the dinner, but couldn’t back down from his grandiose plan, so she needed to borrow the money from my mom to pay for it—SHE ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT TELL MY FATHER. My mom gave her the money.

Next day we all go to the Black Angus. At the conclusion of the meal, he and my dad argue a bit over the bill, but FBiL wins and we all go out to the parking lot while he settled up.

Next day, the Black Angus calls my dad (in whose name the reservation had been made) demanding payment. Asshole FBiL dined-and-dashed the entire party, and kept the money my sister had borrowed from my mom!

Dana Willoughby:

The restaurant I worked at had daily all-you-can-eat specials. Monday was all-you-can-eat half-pound burgers, fries, and coleslaw. The AYCE special was a couple bucks more than the standard burger price, and the restaurant made money because most people would maybe get one re-order of fries or slaw, or maybe once in a while someone would get a second burger. I mean, how many half-pound burgers can one person eat?

Enter Denim Jacket Guy. DJG was a small, pale man, and regardless of the weather, he wore a denim jacket every time he came in, which was nearly every Monday. DJG would order the AYCE burger special and a 40 oz Colt 45 (not all our beers were shitty; this guy just wanted the biggest, cheapest beer). He would come in around 4:00 in the afternoon and stay for a couple of hours. His typical meal would include three orders of steak fries, three orders of coleslaw, two 40 oz beers, an entire bottle of ketchup, and seven half-pound burgers. This was in the late-nineties, and the check would total around $13 or so. And he would leave a generous $2 tip for your troubles.

Caroline Blake:

I worked at a somewhat upscale Pacific West coast (seafood, really) restaurant that had an enormous patio on a dock, with gorgeous views of the water and downtown Vancouver. Sometimes it was possible to take a moment from sweating and running around like crazy in your khakis and too-short golf shirts (yes, that was the “casual upscale” summer uniform, complete with visible love handles, even if you were a size 2) and be amazed at the beautiful sunset reflecting over the water. Needless to say, it was very popular, especially with tourists. Who knew that there are so many cultures that don’t tip?

It was a beautiful summer night, which made it all the worse that my section was now stacked with a group of women, who…oh dear God. Our restaurant had a policy that you can’t be seated until your whole party was there (pretty standard in such a busy place), and these ladies had been waiting to be seated for 20 (!) minutes because three people in their party of 7 weren’t there. They were becoming so loud and obnoxious that my manager sat them at three of my tables in my six table section (because they needed room!) and they barked their drink orders at him. Unfortunately, in the chaos of having a slammed restaurant, he forgot to tell me their drink order. The bartender was also so slammed that it took about 20 minutes to get their drinks by the time I figured out what they had ordered. They were not amused, and proceeded to be the rudest table I have ever had for the next FIVE HOURS to make up for it. An example:

Me: “Would you like any more coffee?”

Botox Betty: “NO SHE DOESN’T!” (Not the one I was offering the coffee to)

Botox Barbara: “OF COURSE I DO!”

Botox Betty (to Barbara): “Oh. Sorry Sweetie!”

Botox Barbara (to Betty): “It’s okay darling, SHE should know if she was any kind of a waitress.”

Sadly as a server, it is sometimes usual to get an “I’m better than you lowly servant” attitude, but they were full on hostile and would mutter that I’m an idiot under their breath between loudly discussing their divorces and the recent work they had done on their faces and their houses and demanding water with “just one ice cube.” Their bill was huge because they kept ordering the most expensive things they could find to take one bite of and then send back, and copious amounts of wine because I didn’t dare cut them off.

After they left, I was at the server station adding up their bills and I realized that not only had they not tipped me, but they were 20 dollars short. With our automatic tip-out policy (we had to give 5%), it ended up that I would have to pay about 60 dollars for the “honor” of serving them.

Tears were welling up in my eyes as I was cashing out the credit cards when a customer, who was sitting two sections over from my section, came up to me. She stuffed a twenty in my hand and patted my back and said, “Here’s twenty bucks for having to deal with those raging bitches.”

It made my night.

Sally Quentin:

My corporate restaurant relies heavily on the online survey printed on each receipt. About a year ago one came in with a complaint about me and my service a few weeks prior.

Once the complaint was read to me, I vaguely remembered this family. Mom, Dad, and two boys, roughly 8 and 6 years old. They were sitting at a booth by a window with the children on the inside by the window.

Her complaint started out with my warning her children their plates were hot, please be careful about touching them, and refusing to allow kids to handle them. This is something I do for all my customers: children or adults. She went into a tirade about her children being able to handle their own plates and it is not my job to tell them what to do, i.e., warning them about the temperature of their plates.

BUT this was not the main complaint. First, allow me to describe my uniform. I wear all black dress pants, long sleeved button up dress shirt, black apron, and black shoes. I am also a big busted gal with a DD bra cup.

According to her complaint, when I leaned over to place her children’s plates down, my BOOBS (her words exactly) landed in her bowl of salad with each plate I handed to them. She wanted me to be written up over my breasts.

Thom Layman:

A couple of years ago, I mentioned to a friend that I don’t have seafood often enough because my wife doesn’t like it. So he insisted that we go get some great seafood that weekend, his treat. He chose a popular Houston-based chain (Pappadeaux, if you’re familiar with it). He said there was a Mahi Alexander I just had to try. I must add that I’d never gone out with this friend without there being a large party along with us. So I hadn’t really experienced his restaurant personality without a buffer.

When we were sat at our table, my friend (we’ll call him “Jim”) picked up the menu immediately to find the entrée he had suggested. To his dismay, it said “Tilapia Alexander” this time. So he turned to the hostess (because we hadn’t even met our waiter or ordered our Diet Cokes yet) and said, “Excuse me. Where is the Mahi Alexander?” in a very annoyed tone. The teenaged hostess just looked confused. She finally said, “Um, I don’t know. I’ll ask your server for you?” Jim gave a curt “thanks” and then started reciting to me his rant about tilapia. Apparently, tilapia is “just a genetically-engineered fish” that’s “bred for its cheapness.” And it was “insulting” and “ballsy” for the restaurant to pretend it was a fair substitute for Mahi. I tried very hard to understand his annoyance while suggesting we just order a different dish. But he didn’t relent.

Then he mistook a random bus boy for the waiter and re-launched his assault on the tilapia. If I didn’t know that Jim’s mother was alive, I would have assumed she was brutally murdered by a gang of tilapia. The bus boy was as confused as the hostess, but immediately went and got the manager. Jim then talked to the manager for ten straight minutes about how tilapia was a sorry substitute for Mahi. He even argued, “My family has been coming to your restaurants for years and the quality has really gone down.” He repeated the phrase “genetically-engineered fish” at least a dozen times. The manager, a polite but firm woman, explained kindly that the Mahi was out of season. But she offered to gladly substitute any meat on the menu for the tilapia and have it prepared in the same way.

After a few more minutes of Jim berating the manager with words like “ridiculous” and “unacceptable,” he finally decided he’d just order the newly-contrived “Halibut Alexander.” Then he dismissed the manager with a wave and a scoff. It was only after this that we met our waiter and ordered our Diet Cokes. The food was delicious and the service was great, which was a relief to me as Jim had nothing else to yell about for the remainder of the meal.

We went to play pool later that night and he spent the first 10 minutes lecturing the manager about the lack of chalk at our table. While he was arguing, I found it on a nearby windowsill.

Ruth Cameron:

Our average turn time for tables is a little over an hour. One night, a family lingered over their meal for three hours and several bottles of wine. In the process of leaving, the father noticed that his jacket was missing. He swore that he had hung it on the side of their booth which is adjacent to both the bar and the bathroom line. He immediately assumed that it had been stolen and concluded that the restaurant was liable. His epic temper tantrum began with him calling the police to file a report, and while my manager was checking the security tapes, he threatened to call the FBI because he didn’t think we “cared enough.” The police arrived, and while taking his report, they somehow figured out that his jacket was in a cab and got it on its way back to the restaurant.

The man came back inside, ordered another glass of wine and waited. When the cab arrived, a police officer delivered the jacket to him. At that point, our GM informed him that it was time to pay his $350 bill.

Now, this is when a normal person would apologize, pay the bill and leave, but not this precious snowflake. Instead, he insisted to the manager that he should not have to pay because the whole ordeal had been so upsetting to him. She insisted. He doubled down and threatened to call the cops again. We all encouraged him to do so, and were about to call for him when he finally agreed to pay his bill. Naturally, he stiffed the server ($0- tip on a $350 bill, 3 hours of camping at the table and an additional 2 hours of terrorizing the whole restaurant), but the cherry on top was that in his whole delusional rant about why he shouldn’t have to pay he informed my manager that “If you knew me, you’d know that I’m actually a really good customer.”

Lindsay Newman:

When I was 16, my mother was an assistant manager at the local Pizza Hell (Pizza Hut, but we literally never called it by it’s proper name) and so lovingly shanghai’d me into the wonderful world of the service industry. I had many a horrific adventures in Pizza Hell, but the worst were the ones that involved the local Santa Claus, who was hatefully nicknamed “Psycho Santa.” Psycho Santa got free food. No one knew why, no one knew who started this long standing tradition, but he always got free food from November till March and no one ever questioned it.

The Psycho Santa tales ranged from groping servers and offering to “stuff their little stocking with his North Pole” to him walking into the kitchen and harassing the cooks who were preparing his food. I was already terrified of this guy and I hoped that everyone was just trying to freak me out. None of those stories had prepared me for the unbridled hell that he would unleash on me.

My encounter with Psycho Santa was on a fateful November afternoon. There was a birthday party in our back room, and in the winter season, Psycho Santa would randomly show up in full yuletide regalia and crash birthday parties, demand free food, and generally fuck the server’s day to hell. Today, he sees we have a party in the back, turns heel and leaves. I breathe a sigh of relief—I had heard the legend of Psycho Santa and had yet to deal with him, and I think today is my lucky day.

HA. HAHAHA.

Ten minutes later, I hear the quietest little sound behind me and turn to see the mother of the birthday boy, a look of extreme concern on her face. She beckons me close and whispers, “I’m so sorry to bother you Miss, but there’s a little problem.”

She’s so polite and seems afraid of offending me, so I slap on the sunniest smile I can manage and reply, “Of course! Tell me what’s up and I’ll do my best to take care of it.”

“Well…Santa Claus has just shown up at my son’s birthday party. He knocked on the back door and we thought he might be an employee.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. Usually, people like when Psycho Santa shows up and tip their server like they booked him themselves for their little darling.

“Well…We’re Jewish.” I nod understandingly, slightly horrified at that alone, but her tale is not finished. “And when I told him that we were Jewish and did not celebrate Christmas, he told me that everyone celebrates Christmas…even Jews.”

And I know right then that whatever kind of good day I was having has just gone down the toilet. I tell her that I am so sorry for the confusion, that Santa does NOT work for us, and that I’ll go and get the manager on duty—which was the GM, a useless fucking paper clip that never dealt with anything, ever—who informs me that I, in my infinite teenaged wisdom and experience, need to deal with the situation.

I gird my loins and march back, and ask Psycho Santa to come with me; amazingly, he complies. I inform him that he’s not wanted at the party in the politest way I possibly can, but he doesn’t seem to understand.

“But I’m Santa Claus!”

“I understand that, sir, but they’re Jewish, and they don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“Don’t celebrate Christmas? That’s the most un-Christian thing I’ve ever heard!”

“That’s because they aren’t Christian. They’re Jewish.”

“Well, even Jew kids like Santa!”

“Sir, many Jewish families don’t teach their children about Santa because that’s not part of their beliefs…” On and on this goes for 15 minutes, until he finally gets pissed off enough that he just plops down at a table.

“Fine. I’ll just get my free food and go then.”

I’m just thankful that he’s shut his face anus about being fucking Santa and that everyone fucking loves Santa, so I agree, take his obscenely large order, and push it through as fast as possible. He takes his food, leaves, and I get a generous tip and a thank you note from the birthday party in the back, along with a slice of cake. And I think that I have survived, and that the worst was over.

NOT EVEN REMOTELY.

The next day, I go about my shift feeling like a champ because I made it through my skirmish with Psycho Santa unscathed. Sure, the guy’s a fucking throbbing pikestaff, but I’ve dealt with worse.

Until he marches through the door with the boxes of food he got yesterday. He slams the boxes down in front of me and yells in my face, “Do I look like I’m gonna put up with some entitled little c*nt ripping me off?”

That alone is enough to send me into the shakes, and I start bobbing my head around like a terrified chicken. My logical brain is wondering “how exactly do you rip someone off when they got free food?” but my gut is like “agree or he’s gonna fucking hurt you.” Thank god for my gut.

He proceeds to yank open the box on top, whips out a fucking pocket knife, and cuts open his “P’zone”. For all you younguns, that was a thing at Pizza Hut before this “artisan” bullshit started. It was like a pizza folded in half without any sauce inside. I refuse to call it anything else, that’s what it was. So Psycho Santa starts brandishing this fucking pocket knife at me, screaming something about me ripping him off and not putting “enough” toppings on the damn thing. Well, in my terror, all I can think to stutter is “I’m sorry sir, we followed the company specs, that’s how much is supposed to be on the P’zone.”

So Santa does what any reasonable human would do: he stabs the fucking pizza box with the pocket knife, walks over to the nearest table, picks up a fucking chair and hurls it down the hall that leads to the back party room, screaming obscenities at me. By this point I’ve wised the fuck up and ducked for cover under the counter, crying for help like the sniveling terrified pissbaby that I was.

The Momager is the manager on duty, and she hears the chair and her sniveling terrified pissbaby daughter crying for help over the noise of the kitchen and gets up front.

Psycho Santa is no match for the Momager. She’s armed with one of the cast iron pizza pans we used for the pan pizzas and she has gone from her usually sweet demeanor to full-on She-Hulk. She comes at him full speed, screaming at him to “get the fuck out before I bash your fucking skull in.” This is a direct quote that has been chiseled into my skull because it remains the most bad-ass thing I have ever heard my mom say.

Psycho Santa is scared shitless and bolts. Momager calls the local yokels, who laugh it off and tell us, “Well, that’s just (Psycho Santa’s real name). He left, didn’t he?” Momager says yeah, and they tell her not to piss him off. Gotta love small town cops.

Do you have a crazy restaurant story you’d like to see appear in Behind Closed Ovens (on ANY subject, not just this one)? Please e-mail [email protected] with “Behind Closed Ovens” in the subject line (or you can find me on Twitter @EyePatchGuy). Submissions are always welcome!

Note: I do not want poop/vomit stories. Please stop sending me poop/vomit stories.

Image via Daniel Korzeniewski/Shutterstock.