Five (very early 20s) (South Asian from South Asia)
(undergraduate or young graduate student?) types, all (male), one of whom is
particularly fervent and has a fairly open shirt, and who talk all over each
other and who ask how big the entrees are if they share and who say they will
pick two and maybe a third once they see how good the food is, and several of
whom ask what is vegetarian and about this one item in particular, and when I explain
the name and nature of that one textured gluten meat substitute that vegans
love, the fervent one is like “We are vegetarian, no egg, no fish sauce, no
oyster sauce, not that,” and even after I explain to him what it is, he shakes
his head and is like, “No, not like that, not like that” with his eyes somehow
all glassy and open and staring like he is dead set against having even
imitation meat entering his body, and they go from ordering apps to an entrée
to back to apps, so I have to stop, ask what the appetizers are, repeat their
order back to them, and then do the entrées list that, and confirm it -- – and
they were only ordering 2 appetizers and 2 entrees in total, no drinks even,
yet somehow they were able to make just that that confusing! – and then when I go over to the register and
send the order back to the back, as I’m turning to leave, one of the (fatter)
(meat-eating) ones scurries up and tells me to add extra chicken to the chicken
fried rice that is one of the two entrees and four things total that they ordered, so I kind of lose
my cool a bit and stride over to the table, tell them that I can do that but I
will now have to go back to the kitchen and stop the cooks, at which point they
all hang their heads down and the (fervent) (kind of open-shirted) one is like,
“No, it is okay,” but I am like, “No, I will do this for you, but I want to
make sure that this is your final order,” and I ask very emphatically and
severely can they please confirm that everything that they ordered is indeed
what they want, because at some point it also becomes hard to stop the kitchen
and make modifications when the order is already in progress, which their order
is.
. . .
(After I go back to the kitchen, I tell the cooks to add
in the extra chicken, I figure out a way to key it in without deleting the first
order since that’s a pain and I don’t have the right keypad authorization codes,
and then I tell my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker that I’m not dealing with that
table anymore and can she please serve them, and she just shakes her head and
says, “No tip, that kind leaves no tip,” and at the end of the night, you know
what, they don’t, and who knows if they would have even if I had kept my cool…. This is the second time a large group of all
men comes in, chaotically orders stuff, makes mistakes, and expects you to
change it, only to leave no tip or a very bad tip, that very same thing
happened with that big group of [grad student-age] [South Asian] people who
made us stay open late and left like $3 on a $142 or $143 bill, if I remember
correctly, after they wanted two orders of the same thing and I thought they
were talking about the level of additional chili and they didn’t catch that
discrepancy when I read back their order to them, and then when they were
getting served they wanted another dish of the fried rice made up, but the
kitchen was already closed, and we had to shrug and be like, “It’s too late
now”… It’s like this type of person that even if you confirm their order to
them, which I do with every customer in order to minimize mistakes, they don’t
listen to it or take it seriously, they expect they can change things at the
drop of a hat. It’s like a[n Indian] guy who I follow on social media was
saying, -- and I’m roughly quoting him here -- his country could do a better job
of encouraging everyday people to possess interiority.)
