During this past week in Indiana, my sister reminded me of our restaurant days; she worked the longest at our parents’ restaurant and has a lot of colorful stories to share from that experience. She got me tuned into restaurant service quality by her complaints over the service at all the restaurants we went to.
I have to admit, the first impression I got when I arrived in Indiana and went to a couple of restaurants was that service was rather sub-par. The first night, we went to Steak N’ Shake and the server didn’t bring me a glass of water even though I requested for it. Luckily I could quench my thirst with the cherry limeade.
Over and over during the past week, I was appalled by how slow service went….during non-peak hours. The worst experience we had on my visit was at an Italian restaurant: the server came and took our appetizer order….and then FORGOT ABOUT US. Oh! We were sitting there munching on the paltry portions of the bruschetta and looking around the restaurant: customers were slowly trickling in, but it wasn’t SLAMMED (i.e., it wasn’t a landslide of people walking in). At one point I turned to find our server just standing in the back of the restaurant with hands on her hips. Uh…..
What made this situation even worse was that the server FINALLY came to our table and even told us to our faces, “I TOTALLY forgot about you guys!” Wow, way to make us feel appreciated. You don’t tell customers that you forgot about them; you can definitely forget about their service then!
After that terrible meal, I told my sister she should make a list of things servers shouldn’t say to their customers. One thought she had during the week sums up the whole list for now:
“These servers don’t realize that we grew up in the restaurant industry. When they give us excuses, we can definitely see through their BS.”
Now, after reading this post, you may be more alert with your next outing at a restaurant/bar/etc.