You have the best of intentions, no doubt, but the gestures you are about to read in this article might make your server’s job harder.
There’s a whole army of workers in a hotel, tasked with cooking stuff, serving it to you, filling your glasses, opening the doors when you enter, and do whatever it takes to make your visit a good one.
You might have a vague idea about how hard these people work to keep their restaurants going but you still overlook some things on your part that can make their job even harder. Here are seven such things which you do to help your servers but are actually counted as misbehavior.
1. You sit by your own will.
You might think that walking into a restaurant and seating yourself at any table randomly is not a big deal but, as a matter of fact, it is. If you seat yourself on your own at any place of your choice, you might make serving difficult for your host.
Reason: The hotel management and the servers have a particular pattern in which the guests are seated to make sure the services are provided seamlessly.point 234 |
If you seat yourself, it is very likely that you throw off the pattern and make things difficult for the staff.point 91 | The nice approach is to hang on for some time so that the staff can get you seated at the appropriate place.point 178 | 1
2. You try to clean the mess you happen to create.
Creating a situation in a restaurant is not something out of the ordinary. It happens all the time. You might lose grip over a glass of wine or flip over a plate full of rice. In such a case, don’t try to clean up the mess you’ve made. Alert the staff and let them take care of the situation.
Reason: First of all, if the management sees you doing that, the waiters can be punished for being not vigilant enough. Second, you might end up having a shard of broken glass in your hand, or a bleeding injury, or can spill wine over the carpet. In short, you can do lots of things to further worsen the situation for the servers.
3. You don’t pay heed to the specials.
Chef specials and recommendations are not food left over from last night that they want to serve you so it doesn’t get spoiled and wasted. Mostly they are something special, cooked by the chef with the good intention to delight your taste buds. Go for them.
Reason: When the waiter lists the day’s specials and you interrupt them to order something else, it’s incredibly rude. Making them serve you something else might also take more time and you will end up eating something less tasty.
4. You leave splitting the check for the end.
Some people consider it unsophisticated to talk about payment or how to split the bill before the order is placed. We suggest you otherwise. Whether it is a local Chinese point or a burger joint, let the server know how you want the check to be split at the time of your order.
Reason: Giving instructions to the server about how to split the bill will surely make the whole process of ordering, dining and billing a whole lot easier for you as well as for the server.
5. You do not give proper feedback about the food.
If anything is wrong about the service or the meal served, don’t rant about it on social media in a virtually anonymous way. If you get the steak under-cooked, the salad soggy or your burger bun over-baked, it is not rude to call the management at the spot and tell them what’s wrong.
Reason: If you take it to the social media to talk about how bad the service or the food was, chances are, you won’t even be heard. If anything is wrong, the right approach is to tell the service provider there and then. It will have a greater impact than ranting on social media.
6. Seeing the server busy, you make your tea on your own.
More often than not, it happens that you have to get your cup filled with fresh tea but the waiter is too occupied to do that, so you move to the bar to pour some fresh tea. There’s no harm in doing that. Right? WRONG! There’s a lot of negative aspects to that. The correct approach is to wait for the person supposed to serve you.
Reason: If the manager sees you helping yourself, the waiter can get in deep trouble for not serving you the correct way. You might even make a mess at the bar because you are not the one supposed to dispense the tea. So, don’t try to help, wait for help to arrive.
7. You stack the empty dishes.
It is quite a job to clean up a table after someone has dined in. You might think it is a good idea to stack all the used utensils so that it is easy for the waiter to collect the mess. It actually isn’t. You are just making their job harder.
Reason: The waiters are trained to clean up the table and they have a specific order to collect the things. Some dishes have to go to the dishwasher, some are disposable, and some need to be washed manually. Don’t mix things up, leave the job to the waiters and enjoy your conversation as the table is being cleared.