...at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
There's a reservation for like 7 for an hour-and-a-half before we close, but only one guy shows up like twenty minutes late, and he says he's waiting for his friends, and so I tell him that the kitchen will be closing sooner than he thinks and that everything will be getting mopped up, so if they want a leisurely meal, he should coordinate their orders and put them in before they all arrive.
And, he says okay, and then he goes outside and sits there and dicks around on his phone at a patio table, and much later he wanders back inside and puts in some appetizer orders, and then he goes and sits at the table and then all of a sudden like less than ten minutes before the kitchen closes, the entire group comes in to the empty restaurant, like well over an hour past their original reservation time.
And, they're standing around talking, and we're like, "Please order now, the kitchen is closing," and there's just these (younger) (South Asians) standing around in the empty restaurant and chaotically pointing at menus and discussing sh*t like they have all the time in the world, and we're like, "Please order now, the kitchen is closing," and even when some of them start to put orders in, they go back and correct or a friend leaps in to correct and it just takes up so much time for them to decide, it's almost like they're perusing the menu instead of finding something that's appealing and ordering that ASAP.
And, when the food is coming out, this one guy who wanted two stir fries of something and then said something about 1 after his friend leapt in to interrupt him and then he specified 1 heat level for that and 2 for a fried rice is like, "Where is the second fried rice?", and I was like, "I'm sorry, sir, there must have been a miscommunication, when I read the order back to you I specified one fried rice with a heat level of 2, so I thought that was the order."
And, even though he wasn't paying attention then, he was like, "Can the kitchen make another one?".
"No," I was like, "I'm sorry, but the kitchen is now closed."
And, that was that, though later towards the end of the meal one of the guys said something about how people were driving in from somewhere and were late, to which I shrugged, since I really had no response.
And, at some point around then, I told the fried rice story about how the guy wanted to order two fried rices and only got one since he didn't have his basic sh*t together, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones was like, "I don't care," not about my story, but about him not getting his second fried rice that he wanted, since she was just over that particular group or more likely she's just over that type of customer.
. . .
(Even though we stayed open 30-45 minutes past close, they left a $0 tip, although there was an automatic gratuity of 18% since it was a large party. In comparison, a table of five [younger] and [middle-aged] [white] women who came in exactly when they did and who were worried about us closing and who sat out on the patio all left nice tips, and a $20 on the table to boot. They were also very quick with their orders, and hurried up and got up to go when they saw us chaining up the tables; in comparison, one guy at the [South Asian] table was scraping the last bits of rice off his plate as he was laughing and talking and it was taking forever and he was the only one still eating, and only when he finished doing that did people start getting up to go to the bathroom before they left, even though they could have started doing that earlier so the group could have left earlier... One was still in the men's room when we shut the lights off and were all walking out, we didn't notice he had been in there still since it's a single-use restroom and like 2-3 of them had to wait around to use it, as we were finishing up the very last things to shut down the restaurant for the night... Honest to G-d, with the way these people behave, it really is like you're the waiter caste, where there's no consideration for you as a person, or monetarily, it's just them and what they want all the time with no reciprocal obligations at all, in a way that a[a American] would recognize.)
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