Top 10 Crazy-Making Restaurant Pet Peeves

Restaurant work is hard work, and most of the editors on the Food staff have bussed tables, waitressed for pennies, or plastered on smiles to welcome diners. But restaurants remain expensive propositions, and if we’re going to blow our hard-earned cash dining out, here’s what we don’t want to happen:

1. Cash only. It doesn’t bug us at a little mom-and-pop place, or buying pad kee mow for $8, but at expensive places? It’s out of line. Having pockets lined with cash is neither safe nor convenient—and restaurant owners, can you announce more loudly that you’re evading the taxman?

2. No reservations. We’re out here in the cold, you guys, pressing our noses against the window and fogging it up, watching other people eat. One editor vents, “In an ideal world a no-reservations policy creates egalitarianism. In reality it creates three-hour waits.”

3. No hooks under the bar. Please give us hooks on which to hang our bags and huge winter coats.

4. The condescending server. OK, so it’s a really fancy restaurant. We get it. But don’t roll your eyes when one of us asks you what a crudo is.

5. Overly chillax servers. The dining world is more casual these days, sure, but if I’m wearing a dress and my date’s in a tie, we don’t want to see your hairy bare feet in Birkenstocks, bro.

6. When a waiter comes up and interrupts you just as you get to the damn punchline.

7. Tables too close together. Did you want to sit along that cozy-looking banquette? Too bad. You’re going to have to leave the restaurant, hit the gym, and drop 15 pounds before doing so. Tables for two set three inches apart drive us crazy. It’s embarrassing when a table has to be pulled out every time we have to go powder our noses.

8. Checks that vanish…or never appear. This has got to be a nightmare for a busy server to schedule, but if we’re done our meal, we’d love it if you didn’t disappear into another dimension with our checks. Neither, however, do we want them dropped while we’re midway through our entrée…which happens often to solo diners.

9. Clearing plates too soon. We know, we know, “turn and burn.” You’ve gotta get the next party into our seats. But please don’t take away my mom’s salmon just as she’s speared the last bite with her fork and the rest of us are still working.

10. Worst table in the house. Whether it’s next to the jangling silverware station, within aromatic distance of the bathroom, or by the drafty door, please don’t give us the worst table in the house. Especially when no one else is in the restaurant. Someone’s got to sit there, sure. We just don’t want it to be us.

Tip well out there, folks. It can’t be easy waiting on people as high-maintenance as we are.