Friday, February 24, 2012

Should I Send It Back?

Image Source & More Good Commentary Here
Here's one for the Parsley & Sage Advice Dept.

Long-time reader and right-wing, gun-toting, liberal-bashing iconoclast Greg Perry asks...

"If we send food back due to something being wrong, is there ANY realistic danger of something being done to it out of spite as long as we're polite and reasonable? ... I always hesitate and usually just don't get something corrected out of fear."

TheWorkingGuy.com responds :

I almost always - and encourage you to - send something back if it's wrong, and that goes quintuple if you're polite and reasonable. No biggie, it happens, and you are paying good and possibly hard-eared money for what you ordered and you deserve to get exactly what you want when you eat out.


Seriously it happened to me just last night. Two nice ladies, one ordered her steak "Medium, Plus"... I came by right after her food was delivered and upon glancing at her Filet, I realized it looked more like a nice Medium-Rare to me even before I saw the look on her face after she cut into it. I was already reaching to take it away as she brought up the problem to me. I know our kitchen will fix it without animosity.

My fault or the kitchen's, we're embarrassed when this happens. Everywhere I've ever worked has fixed such things as promptly as possible, and without the drama the movie "Waiting" incurs is allegedly normal. (For those who have seen it - and I don't really recommend you do, it's tacky - that was "drama" by the way - a fictionalized exaggeration of what we go through, occasionally.) Besides, error or not, some people and even restaurants have differing definitions of Rare, Medium, Mid-Well, etc - or even "spicy" for that matter - so some issues may not even be mistakes, just misunderstandings. A cook might be offended when something goes back if he feels "That's a perfect Medium" but that's just by his or the restaurant's definition, altho maybe not yours. Lighting makes a big difference also. Something that's mid-rare can look almost well-done under different lighting I've noticed, so you might want to try a small bite before saying for sure something's wrong.

I don't know what styles of restaurants you (Greg, or any reader) frequent, but my first serving job was Ruby Tuesday, and I've arguably moved up from there. Ruby's and Olive Garden are well-known chains I worked at in the 80's and 90's, so they make great examples. At restaurants like these that offer what they'd call "full-service dining" (opposed to say Sizzler, Golden Corral, etc - where you do some of the work, go through lines, etc) my experience with restaurants of such caliber is that you don't have to worry at all about sending something back. Even if the server has a bit of an attitude about it (and they shouldn't) Ruby's and OG "level" of restaurants are self-respecting and customer service oriented enough to have management (if not staff) that respects their guests' opinions and needs, and wants to take care of any problems so you'll feel confident coming back. Besides, don't you think I'd rather you TELL ME something is wrong so we can make it right, rather than only hear about it after you've called our corporate office - or written a bad review online that can never be fixed?

Most restaurants are this way, full-service or not, but the "higher-end" places are going to try even harder to make sure you're happy, and are generally staffed with more professional people for whom fixing our own error is "SOP" (Standard Operating Procedure). Some items may just turn out to be way spicier, saltier, or sweeter than the menu (or the server) led you to believe, and even if the meal is "right" by the restaurant's standards, if you don't like it, just stop eating after two or three bites and say so, and politely ask for something else. Sure, it's a grey area if you ordered something you actually don't like and that's obviously your fault, but most places would rather win you as a return customer than "win the battle" of making you pay for something you didn't like and didn't eat. We really only get testy when you eat three quarters or nine tenths of a meal, and then speak up, acting undignified about the whole thing.

Let me put something in perspective tho, for anybody who wonders about this. Have you ever cooked for and served 500 people in a single day? How about 100? How about 1,000? Bringing potato salad to the church picnic is one thing, as people will either like it or not, and will either rave about your recipe to you, or they'll move on to Beehive Lady's side dish and won't say diddly to you. But now imagine that everyone at that picnic, social, whatever, gave you specific instructions on what they individually wanted from you!

Of course restaurants are set up for this sort of thing, and not you, but just what do you honestly think the odds of serving a few hundred people and getting every last one of their dishes exactly right, every time, day in and day out are? Not real good, I'll tell ya now.

Point being, depending upon the frequency you dine out, receiving a wrongly-made dish may happen to you maybe once a month, or maybe only once per year. But in our business, we experience this almost every day, and perhaps several times per day (collectively, as a staff... I don't mean I personally see a messed-up entree every shift among just the people I'm waiting on, but collectively, my restaurant might make one or two such mistakes per day). We're generally madder at ourselves for letting it happen, than we could ever be at you for pointing it out. If it's our fault we know good and well it's our job to make it right and to make you satisfied - at minimum - but hopefully ecstatic.

While most full-service restaurants these days have fancy-schmancy touch-screen computers for wait staff to ring orders up on, I'm old enough to remember when we had to hand-write the tickets, and put them on a metal rail for the cooks to view. That's right - the entire crux of you getting your order served correctly hinged upon a perhaps only high school-aged cook working for minimum wage who may or may not have "smoked a big fattie" when he left for work, reading my hand-writing - which is atrocious - correctly, and then cooking your order and about 50 others per hour correctly. And back then, I might have been the one doing the smoking before work for that matter, so account for that too.

There's really a long chain of events that happens between the time you order and when you receive your food in fact, and when you think about all the things that can go wrong, you might actually be a little astonished or impressed that most places can actually get things right as often as we do!

One, I could have mis-heard you. I might write Crab Cakes when you said "Crab Bisque" (this happened to me at this job in fact. In a busy place with lots of people talking over the noise of other guests, Chicken Salad and Chicken Sandwich kinda sound alike, for that matter). Two, YOU might have said Prime Rib when you meant Ribeye - this happened all the time at Cattle Baron in fact (where I worked for eleven years) and I can think of several times when someone else at the table "backed me up" by saying "No John ... you said Prime Rib." God love 'em!

Then, I have to write down exactly what you said and (nowdays) push the right buttons and possibly type out your special instructions one letter at a time - correctly - in a dimly-lit environment - a process that I may be stressed or tempted to hurry through because I need to deliver to you and/or others their drinks before they melt. Did I mention that there's likely another stressed server hovering behind me, wanting me to me hurry up and get off of the computer because they need to use it too?

So, assuming that experienced, professional people under those conditions can get everything 100% right 100% of the time (and we can't), now it's up the cooks and/or chefs to get everything right. Then, when everything "comes up" right because the cooks are awesome, then somebody - a manager hopefully but perhaps a waiter or a food runner (who may or may not have graduated high school)  - has to correctly pick out you and your lovely wife's two plates from the other 5 or 10 that came up very recently in the window. And then actually take it to the correct table, which happens hopefully 99% of the time but not always, and we can just hope that whoever actually left the kitchen with your plates actually grabbed the medium Filet and not the medium-well one that looked pretty identical, or got the chicken with no sour cream like you asked, rather than the one right next to it prepared normally.

These little errors happen so often from our perspective, that most places do in fact have a specific procedure for handling it - beginning usually with a "re-hash ticket." A server simply hand-writes the order the way it's supposed to go out, the cooks will give it top priority, and then a manager must be informed. At Cattle Baron  our policy was that a manager must run out all re-hashes. You see, not only do we care, but we realize that these things happen regularly enough to have rules about how to handle them. Where I work now, did you know that I can get in trouble for NOT informing a manger the second I know such a problem has occurred? We take this seriously enough to not only want to fix it asap, but also to get a manager at your table to let you know he or she is there for you, taking care of this personally. A little good will and attention like that goes a long way towards preventing a diner from getting mad about the situation.

If something comes out wrongly to you, my manager is most likely going to visit you while it's being corrected, and is also very likely to check with you one more time, after you've received your order. For more serious errors that required a lot of time to make right (all restaurant's policies and practices differ somewhat here) we might either comp your meal, offer a free desert, or give you a gift card or free appetizer voucher for when you return. Some places may not however, especially if the problem was small and fixed quickly, so don't print this out and take it with you to every restaurant you dine at, and tell them "Well Guy said..."

But in short you should never feel embarrassed about alerting your server if you think something's wrong, or be afraid to send something back if it's not exactly what you ordered. Just don't be an ass about it, and everything will be fine. We won't be "all aghast" or offended (at you anyways - we might be mad at ourselves, or a little peeved at the cook if we feel they just tanked our tip) but this occasionally happening is actually a very routine part of our job. Greg hit it on the head with his question actually - be "polite and reasonable" and you can count on us being apologetic and professional.

I do envision the day coming, however, when some restaurants begin to debut touch-screen computers at the tables, which help the establishment save on "labor costs" and allow you, the paying customer, to simply punch in your own orders, just the way you want them. And guess what'll happen when that day finally dawns? You'll occasionally make mistakes too; the ability to order pizza online has already proven this to be true.

I can't wait for the day when I have to go back to the kitchen and ask for a re-hash because I brought you exactly what you ordered, only to hear you say "Well yeah.. I know that's what I ordered, but it's not what I wanted. Fix it, and bring me a free desert later, too."

Now that could probably make a server spiteful. I'd steer clear of eating anything you get for free in this "restaurant of the future," if you're the type of person who would try pulling THAT one.

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