Restaurant weirdness....
We Went in to a Bennigan's this weekend, we had about the most apathetic waiter you can possibly imagine. His service as a whole was O.K., but it was nigh impossible to flag him down, between his minimally required stops. As if this were not enough, he seemed quite distraught/disappointed that we were not ordering drinks (just iced tea) early Sunday afternoon. His (lack of) stress level peaked to almost concerned when we ordered only appetizers as a meal (for the Mrs and I, the kids had meals). We got our food in a timely fashion, but in the final stretch weirdness began.
I got up to use the restroom (which was a complete and utter mess). On my way back, I heard two wait staff talking about how a table of 4 just finished eating and then ordered the "40 buffalo wings" special, and how could anyone possibly eat that much food. I chuckled to myself and went back to the table. We had to flag the waiter down to get our check, it took three passes for him to even notice me waving (I had to stand). He brought the check and took off like a shot, and as we were looking at it, we noticed our check was $20 too much. Normally if we had gone to a Bennigan's on a Saturday night and had a beer or two, we would have never questioned the amount (at this point I still hadn't put it together). We flagged the waiter down again and pointed out the mistake, he started to say: "You ordered them", until he saw the look on my face. He said: "I'll go fix this" and was gone for quite some time. Meanwhile about 4 minutes later, a manager showed up with two gigantic armfuls of chicken wings. We all told him all smiling together as he walked up: "We didn't order those!", he almost dropped them making the U-turn to get away from us. It was then that I realized the party of 4 the wait staff was talking about was us! It was still another 5 minutes before our waiter came back with the corrected bill (even though he had left the incorrect one on our table when he left). We've been to this Bennigan's many times and had much better service when they've been packed to the gills (which they were NOT yesterday).
We're thinking the waiter was ticked he wasn't making a big sale/tip on a table of 4 and popped that on our bill thinking we wouldn't pick up on the amount being off and that we would be long gone before the wings arrived. If we had ordered a beer, he might have got away with it. We noticed as we left, the wings were still on the pick-up counter for the wait staff.
Luckily for us, we were all in good spirits, and we were chuckling about it for the rest of the day.
Think about it....40 Buffalo wings for 4 people. My kids & Mrs HATE Buffalo wings, and I don't think I could eat more that 4 or 5 ...even if I was really hungry. Do we look like we could eat 10 wings each? I know the kids and the Mrs don't, but I imagine, I could be taken for as such.....but after eating already? ......I think the waiter was pulling a scam. The only thing that makes me think otherwise is that they actually arrived.....I would imagine if he were intelligent and wanted to scam us, the order would have never actually been processed.
2 comments:
You didn't tip him, did you? Or at least a penny, maybe?
When I low tip I always leave a note explaining why. Of course, then I never go back to the restaurant. Who wants people spitting in your food? It's only happened to me once, and it was just a few months ago.
That was my initial incliniation, I was going to round the "revised" total off to the nearest dollar for the tip on the credit slip (usually ticks off the wait staff and management).
....but Alas the good-hearted Mrs was convinced it could have been an honest mistake and required that I give him at least 10% (we usually do 15-20% for good service).
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