TOP SECRET! I have seen servers mess with your credit card. If a server doesn’t like you, he might try to embarrass you by bringing your credit card back and saying, “Do you have another card? This one didn’t go through.”
1. Don’t order fish on Sunday or Monday. Fish is usually delivered twice a week, so you’ll get the freshest fish when you order any day between Tuesday and Friday. To be sure, you can always ask the restaurant when they get theirs.
2. I’ve seen some horrible things done to people’s food: steaks dropped on the floor, butter dipped in the dishwater.
3. I never ask for lemon in a drink. Everybody touches them. Nobody washes them. We just peel the stickers off, cut them up, and throw them in your iced tea.
4. We put sugar in our kids’ meals so kids will like them more. Seriously. We even put extra sugar in the dough for the kids’ pizzas.
5. At a lot of restaurants, the special is whatever they need to sell before it goes bad. Especially watch out for the soup of the day. If it contains fish or if it’s some kind of “gumbo,” it’s probably the stuff they’re trying to get rid of.
6. Your “fresh” salad might not be. At one restaurant where I worked, the salads were made up to three days before they’re served. They were sitting on a tray with a thousand other salads in the refrigerator. The waiters went back, grabbed a plate and some dressing, and handed it to the customer.
7. Sometimes, we stick a fork in it. At one bakery restaurant, they used to make this really yummy peach cobbler in a big tray. A lot of times, servers don’t have time to eat. So we all kept a fork in our aprons, and as we cruised through the kitchen, we’d stick our fork in the cobbler and take a bite. We’d use the same fork each time.
TOP SECRET! I have seen servers mess with your credit card. If a server doesn’t like you, he might try to embarrass you by bringing your credit card back and saying, “Do you have another card? This one didn’t go through.”
8. There really is no caffeine in there. In most restaurants, after 8 p.m. or so, all the coffee is decaf because no one wants to clean two different coffeepots. I’ll bring out a tray with 12 coffees on it and give some to the customers who ordered regular, others to the ones who ordered decaf. But they’re all decaf. Oh, and if you order specific milk, very few restaurants carry whole milk, 2 percent milk, skim milk, and half-and-half; it’s just not practical.
9. Water has a cost. My biggest pet peeve? When I walk up to a table of six or seven people and one person decides everyone needs water. I’m making a trip to deliver seven waters, and four or five of them never get touched.
10. Use your waiter’s name. When I say, “Hi, my name is JR, and I’ll be taking care of you,” it’s great when you say, “Hi, JR. How are you doing tonight?” Then, the next time you go in, ask for that waiter. He may not remember you, but if you’ve requested him, he’s going to give you really special service.
11. If you’re worried about cleanliness, check out the bathroom. If the bathroom is gross, you can be sure the kitchen is much worse.
12. If you walk out with the slip you wrote the tip on and leave behind the blank one, the server gets nothing. It happens all the time, especially with people who’ve had a few bottles of wine.
13. Always examine the check. Sometimes large parties are unaware that a gratuity has been added to the bill, so they tip on top of it. Waiters “facilitate” this error. It’s dishonest, it’s wrong—and I did it all the time.
SOURCES: Interviews with more than two dozen servers across the country at restaurants including well-known pizza chains, casual restaurants, Mexican restaurants; Charlie Kondek, former waiter at a Denny’s in Central Michigan; Kathy Kniss, who waited tables for ten years in Los Angeles; Judi Santana, a server for ten years; Charity Ohlund; Jake Blanton; Chris, a New York City waiter and the founder of bitterwaitress.com; Steve Dublanica, veteran New York waiter and author of Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip—Confessions of a Cynical Waiter; and JR, waiter at a fine-dining restaurant and author of the blog servernotslave.wordpress.com.