Bad Habits, Bad Service, and Bacon Coulee

I’m not proud of what I’m about to tell you. But I think you’ll thank me. Mostly for admitting that I’m just another deeply flawed human being walking this spinning blue planet—and for telling the truth.
I like to pride myself on being rather unflappable. Emotionally steady and able to find the humor in any situation I’m placed in and yet… some are triggers and can toss me like a piece of trash into a swirling eddy of unhappiness, anger, and even revenge.

Maybe, just maybe dear reader, you know what I’m talking about.

It was 7:00 pm on a balmy Friday night. After a week full of jumbly-stuff, all the two of us could focus on was enjoying a scrumptious meal at one of our favorite local foodie hangouts—and a nice red wine. I had the foresight to make a reservation so getting a coveted table on the patio was no problem.

As we were guided outside past the bar I couldn’t help but notice how packed the place was. It was loud and lively, filled with couples and groups of friends starting off their weekend right. That felt good. The place had recently re-opened after an extensive renovation and I was happy to see the neighborhood showing their support.

After being seated by the hostess we both smiled at each other, exhaled deeply, and held hands across the table. Everything was perfect.

We had been assured that our waitress, Sara, would be with us shortly so we started talking about this and that, catching each other up on our day–you know, your basic pre-dinner chit-chat. Ten minutes later, after running out of small talk, we started looking around. That’s the moment I realized we were invisible. That no one had come by to acknowledge our presence.

If it’s Friday, the end of a long work week, and wine has not been offered to my husband in a timely manner—he gets fidgety.

Enter bad habit number one: I try to ease an uncomfortable situation by justifying it.

“It’s really busy tonight”, I say just to cut the tension that’s building with each moment that goes by wine-free.

“Yeah, but they have a lot of staff”, he replies looking around the restaurant. And he’s right. I can see five waiter/waitresses just servicing the patio. One of them MUST be Sara.

Enter bad habit number two: I’m going to turn my attention away from my partner and make things right by catching the eye of our waitress.

It was then that I caught a glimpse of someone walking toward us with purpose. A girl in her mid-twenties, cute and blonde and wearing an apron, so I assumed she was OUR Sara.

Hallelujah! Wine at last, wine at last, Thank God Almighty, wine at last!

“Here she comes”, I declare just as she walks all of that purpose directly to a table behind us.

He looks at his watch. “It’s been twenty minutes”. Now he’s getting annoyed, looking around with his head on its maximum swivel speed.

My husband has sparkle. He just does, And never is it on display more than with the wait staff at restaurants. But I fear his sparkle is diminished; long gone as Sara finally approaches our table from behind my back.

“I like your hair”, she deadpans, referring to the purple underneath the gray. “I like your earrings”, I spit out immediately, laughing a little too loud, trying to diffuse the tension.

Enter bad habit number three: It’s really just an extension of BH#2. Soothe and diffuse. It can be jokes, laughing, even tap-dancing.

“I’d love some wine and a bottle of San Pellegrino when you get a chance”, he wedges in-between the phoney-baloney compliments.

“Great”, she smiles and disappears and when I say disappears I’m not exaggerating. I swear I saw her walk into a magical cupboard and enter an imaginary realm where she is a princess and not a waitress who is getting slammed on a busy Friday night.

7:38…and counting…and still nothing. No water, no bread. And definitely no wine. Now I’M looking at MY watch. Mama needs some alcohol.

Enter bad habit number four: I absorb all of the mad in the room and take it on. I fight the urge to get all Norma Raye and stand on my chair railing against every social injustice including bad service while dining out. (I thought I had a handle on this but apparently not.)

Things are starting to spiral downward. This is the point when you start looking at the tables around you, taking score. “They came in after we did and they already have their drinks and appetizers”, I found myself saying. I hate doing that. It’s petty and stupid but you just can’t help it when you seem to be seated in NO MANS LAND.

I know what you’re thinking, I really do. Tell somebody that you need some attention!
We start to debate the issue and I have to tell you, without wine, common sense has flown out the window. Who do we tell? The hostess who is running around like a headless chicken? The waitress herself? I’d need to send out a search party to find her and I’m assuming she’ll just get defensive. Maybe the manager?

When did my (our) happiness become so conditional? Why can’t we just chill and enjoy our evening in the midst of sucky service?

Good question!

I don’t want a scene so I haven’t told my famished, wine deprived, crab-ass of a husband that I can see Sara (who has apparently escaped the cupboard), standing and chatting at the bar. I’m assuming she went there over twenty minutes ago with the best intentions of getting us our wine but…I’m suppressing another urge my body has summoned. The one to saunter over to the bar, grab Sara by the ear, take her out back and beat the shit out of her.

I really hate it when things that seem outside of my control hijack a good time. The mood at our table has shifted from buoyantly jovial to passive-aggressively pissed off.

Sara walks toward us with a large tray of drinks balanced on her shoulder. “This has to be us”, he says hopefully, straightening up in his chair as I observe a warm basket of bread being placed two tables over by a waitress worth her weight in gold. Sara walks right past us being sure not to make eye contact. Can we all agree that selective eye contact is a dark art?

He turns in his chair to stare in her direction. Can she feel his laser-like gaze burning a hole in the back of her head? I wonder, will her hair catch fire?

Oh, hello bad habit number five: Wishing bad things on perfectly lovely people who are acting like asshats.

Just then somebody else brings us our drinks. I grab this angel in human form’s arm before he can leave and order two appetizers, It’s not his job to take our order and he looks at me funny but shakes his head okay.

Sara returns with one of our orders and plunks it down in the middle of the table as her eyes scan the room, and leaves without giving us any share plates. It’s after 8 pm and I’m suddenly starving. Mama needs some foodies. Fast. The alcohol is going to her head and things could get ugly so I start eating, making the long traverse with my overloaded fork from the plate—across the table—to my mouth. My husband follows my lead and before we know it we both end up with grits in a bacon coulee all over the front of us. I’m hungrily sucking pieces of bacon off of my sweater. Can this night get any better?

“What should we do?” I ask with earnestness now that I’m buzzed with more food on the front of my outfit than in my stomach. If I had my sense of humor and wasn’t hostile from absorbing all the mad— it would be funny. I usually find everything funny. But four people who sat down a half hour after us are happily finishing their dessert. Satiated and ready to leave.

That’s just not fucking funny.

“We’ve let it go too far. We should have said something to someone an hour ago. Now we just look like a couple of starving idiots who are wasting a perfectly good table in a very busy restaurant.”

My husband gets up, folds his napkin neatly into triangle and walks toward the back.’Oh God, here we go’, I think, ‘he’s going to complain, and they’re going to spit in our food’.

Back in the day, my husband worked his way through college as a waiter in a fancy French restaurant in Beverly Hills, and his stories of cranky customer retribution are stomach turning. Fingers and other body parts jabbed into food and drinks…cigarette ashes in sauces…terrifying but true. But that experience has also made him endlessly patient with waiters. He can recognize hard work and a job well done. He laughs with them, validates them with compliments and tips them well.

While my head is turned searching the place for the enigma called Sara, (I’m afraid he’s going to be the one to take her out back by the scruff of her neck and beat her senseless), the table is cleared, silverware and all. As she whizzes by, I relax a little at the sight of her alive and well, and then I remember that she’s our waitress goddamnit and I yell out our entrees and inquire about the second appetizer. She stops in her tracks and looks at me as if I told her she could never have children and does a thing with her head, like, ‘can’t you see how busy I am?’ —and walks away, back to the bar where she takes root for another ten minutes.

The same lovely gentleman who delivered our first appetizer delivers the second one, (full of ashes or finger pokes, I’m sure), this time with plates. I’m so busy gushing my appreciation that I forget to mention that we have no flatware. When I ask Sara for a fork she looks bewildered like everyone else is eating with their feet or elbows and I—the overdemanding, spoiled woman at table seventeen—wants a FORK!

My husband returns and suddenly things start to look up. The sparkle has returned and I can only imagine why. Some things are better left unsaid. Within a minute, the flatware appears—as if by magic.

It’s amazing how when you are treated like shit, the smallest gesture, like being given utensils, feels like a gift. Like when a restaurant starts to act restautraunty it can make you feel giddy.

Our food arrives in an appropriate amount of time delivered by an effusive upper management looking woman. Then a man in a suit brings us water. Finally, water! After an hour. I wanted to give him a kiss on lips and a standing ovation!

“We are so bad at this!” I lament on the walk to our car. “God! we have such a hard time dealing with bad service”.

And there it is, bad habit number six: I say We when I should say I.

My husband gives me side-eye which is our silent signal that he ‘took care of the situation’ which could mean that Sara has taken up permanent residency inside of the magical cupboard OR he tipped her only ten percent, which in California is practically punishable by law.

So, you guys,
I hope you can see ALL of the places where I went wrong and how my bad habits, just when I think I’ve kicked them, seem to have a recurring role in my life

What do you do in situations like that? I’ve done it all and had mediocre results. The waitress or waiter usually gets defensive, the host couldn’t give a shit and although management wants to hear about poor service, IN THEORY, they have rarely been magnanimous in the moment.

Carry on,
xox