Summer is here which means it’s time for every customer in the world to suddenly want to eat outside. Working at a restaurant that has a patio is fraught with high drama because the success of the patio is based on the weather. And customers sometimes don’t understand that we have no control of that.
Customer: It’s really bright out here.
Waitress; Do I look like Mother fuckin’ Nature to you?
On a recent review for Panama City Beach, Florida’s Runaway Island Beach Bar and Grill, a woman is upset that she waited an hour and fifty minutes for a table after being told it would only be an hour. While she was waiting, it began to rain which is what increased the wait time. The woman says it drizzled for five minutes but the restaurant said that it rained for twenty minutes, “long enough to douse everything on our back deck.” Our customer retorts with “I had a young child who was growing impatient and there were at least a dozen tables (if not more) inside and outside. My biggest complaint is if you know rain caused additional delays-then include it in your wait time.” She also says it was “hardly a rain!” Thankfully, we have another customer who pipes in to confirm that it was indeed a twenty minute rain and that the staff was hustling to get all the customers covered and then they diligently worked to get all the tables dried as soon as it stopped raining. Our grumpy customer also is upset that the restaurant seemed short-staffed on a holiday weekend. Finally, she says that the food was not worth ever coming back and that many people agreed with her as they all waited for their tables.
Where shall I begin?
- If it rains, yes, you are going to have to wait longer. Every table that is outside is now deemed unusable and it can cut the seating in half. So, yeah, that means you might wait twice as long.
- Just because you have a young child does not mean you take precedence in the seating rotation. If you don’t know your child well enough to gauge whether or not she can handle waiting for a table for over an hour, that’s your issue and not anyone else’s.
- How can the hostess predict how long it’s going to rain? If she could look into her crystal ball and see that the drizzle will stop in twenty minutes, she could give you a more accurate wait time, but if the high-paid weather forecasters on TV can’t get it right, how the hell do you expect an 18-year-old hostess to do it?
- We know that customers like to exaggerate to make their point stronger. Don’t say it rained for five minutes when everyone knows it rained for twenty. It makes you look stupid. Well, more stupid.
- It’s Memorial day weekend, lady and you’re eating at a restaurant on a beach in Florida. Of course, it’s gonna be busy. No matter how many servers are on the floor, it’s gonna be busy. Face facts or eat at home.
- So, while you were waiting for your table for an hour and fifty minutes, everyone around you was agreeing that the food was not worth coming back for? This makes no sense. If the people are waiting with you and they are telling you the food is not worth the wait, why the hell are they waiting? Or do you mean that while you were waiting you were talking to people who were already eating? Because if that’s what you were doing, you are even more annoying than I thought. Maybe if your young child was getting impatient, you should have paid attention to her rather than bothering people who were trying to eat their meal in peace without having to listen to some ranting customer whining about the long wait and the weather.
Listen people, if you want to give a bad review to a restaurant, at least try to make the review about something the restaurant has control over. To leave a 1-star review because it started raining and you had to wait longer than you were told is just a customer complaining for the sake of complaining. Try harder.
lawn
I do accept as true with all the ideas you’ve offered
in your post. They’re really convincing and can certainly work.
Still, the posts are very brief for starters.
May you please lengthen them a bit from next time? Thank you for the post.
JDamon
Plus the host may not have given you a run around you know how many times I have dropped a check off when it is busy but the customer still decides to sit the for an hour even though it is packed or not I still as a server in the hospitality industry have to check on this customer(s) make sure they are ok maybe if they want another drink and yet at the same time want to turn this table so I can have my next saying this that table might have been the one that this place was trying to seat you at, but couldn’t cause we can’t just say ” hey you’re done eating can you please remove yourself now because there are plenty of impatient people at the door waiting to sit down “
Concerned Citizen
Stephanie is right. When there are 300+ people on the wait list (as the manager said, and on Memorial Day weekend in a tourist town, I definitely believe him), the restaurant really doesn’t care if you go elsewhere. There are 300 people behind you, and they really don’t care if some of them go elsewhere, too. I mean, we want customers, but we also want to be able to see some relief in sight. And it seems to me that this isn’t an issue of an inexperienced hostess. Based on everything said, they had a freak shower and they had to make up for it. If everyone wants to sit outside, they’re gonna have to wait for the rain to stop and for everything to be dried off. The hostess, manager, server, busser, barback, etc. can’t possibly predict how long that rain shower will last, hence it’s also difficult to predict how much longer the wait will be.
Irish Chef
Oh Chris just stop man and put it down to bad luck and weather!
Stephanie
KarenL if you honestly think we care that you go elsewhere, you’re delusional. We try to be as honest as possible when quoting wait times, but there are several factors that can drastically change the wait time (such as in this situation) and that’s out of our hands.
Sous Chef
Chris, how would you feel if the hostess tells you while walking to your table that you MUST be finished eating within 25 mins so the next party can be seated? So she can be spot-on on her wait time quote.
Kim
Maybe her kid will jump into a gorilla pit, and then she’ll have something else to complain about.
outhousecat
Do we really KNOW that it wasn’t her kid that jumped into the gorilla pit?
KarenL
I can sympathize with Chris. It seems his main issue (now that everyone explained how restaurants operate) is the TWO hour wait after being quoted half that time. I’m sure that at least one time everyone has also been in very frustrating situations when going to a restaurant and you are quoted a wait time that is not even remotely realistic. Sometimes I think restaurants do that on purpose because they don’t want you to go elsewhere, or the hostess is either untrained, or having a bad day or plain incompetent, which may be the case here, who knows. It just seems to me if there was better communication, he probably wouldn’t have been frustrated enough to complain on Yelp.
Anonymous
The hostesses are ESTIMATING (that’s in caps because it’s the key word) the wait times based on when they think people will leave and free tables up. Since the hostesses are not psychic, they do not know exactly how long the other customers plan to stay. All they can do is guess.
Stephanie
And for you to ONLY have a two hour wait for an 8-top at dinner on Memorial Day, is impressive. Next time, try making a reservation.
Stephanie
Oh, Chris! Can one person really be this ignorant?! Maybe stop for ONE second and think that you are not the only customer in the restaurant, and try to realize that there is a lot more going on than you can see. The only point you keep reinforcing is that your wait time was longer than quoted. Guess what? That happens. It’s a restaurant, obviously with a very long wait. Sometimes the host may think it will only be a few minutes longer until a table leaves, or until the kitchen clears up. The staff isn’t out to get you, they’re trying to make your experience better. And for your personal reference next time you visit a restaurant, empty tables do NOT mean available seating. There are reservations, kitchen crashes, a plethora of things than can cause empty tables to go unseated for awhile. As for asking “how can you be short staffed?” Wow. Just wow. You can come up short staffed ANYWHERE, ESPECIALLY on a holiday weekend. You can’t force employees to show up to work. From your review, you clearly haven’t the slightest clue as to how restaurants run. For your sake and to have a better experience next time, open your mind and think that there are a million plus things happening in a restaurant that you have no idea about. Take a step back and look at how many people are correcting the things you say, and realize you are in the wrong. You can either choose to eat somewhere or don’t, but don’t leave a one star review on a restaurant for something that they had no control over, because it makes you look like a jackass. I truly hope you have a better experience next time you go out to eat, wherever that may be.
Samantha
I also want to point out that patio guests tend to “camp” out a lot longer than those dining indoors. If it’s nice out, those people will stay and nurse their drink and chat for hours. It’s hard to say. You can’t control that or ask them to leave either. Quoting patio times is almost impossible because of that.
Maggs
People get upset all of the time if we have “available” tables and “just are deciding not to seat them.” They don’t even understand what is going on most of the time. We fill the restaurant until the cooking staff says to hold off and we do so. We do this so that the kitchen can catch up on long and complicated orders(gluten free, severe allergies, modifications). If you modify something at my restaurant( such as no tomatoes in a stuffed chicken), it takes twice as long to cook and get out to a guest because they have to roll a brand new roll of stuffed chicken with no tomato. Generally, we have 3-4 cooks on the line, and 1-2 on prep. Then we have a salad maker and expeditor. Then we can have anywhere between 8-20 servers on, depending on the day. Say we only schedule 10 servers. That’s four tables a server in the main dining room. Then at least four servers are expected to take their four tables in addition to patio tables(up to four extra tables). So in order to not overwhelm the server and the kitchen, we hold on seating. Because we would rather you wait a few extra minutes up front where you can decide to leave and go elsewhere than to have you sitting and waiting an hour and a half for food. Thank you Chris for your input. But unless you completely understand how a restaurant operates, please don’t complain on anything you’ve complained about.
Server 30+
Ooohhhhh Chris,
You have no idea how hard these fine folks obviously tried to make it a great night for every one of their customers. You’re not understanding how any of this works. Your just venting your frustration. Stay home. Nobody needs people like you. ?
Manager
Hardly anybody requested inside or first available. That’s the big issue here. Again, we’re very sorry that your night out didn’t go as planned. We tried our best.
Manager
The restaurant was not short staffed. The rain came out of nowhere. There were open tables inside because 90% of the guests wanted to wait for the rain to clear so they could sit outside. Most beach restaurants offer seating “inside, outside, or first available.” Again, 90% of the 314 people on the wait, (yes, you read that right) chose the “outside” option. But you can’t seat outside if it’s raining, and once the rain stops, everything has to be dried off. As soon as it stopped, there was staff outside drying everything, managers included (even the OWNER was outside helping dry tables). I think that all anyone here is saying is that maybe a little patience to unforeseen circumstances would go a long way.
Chris
Ok manager, we were told that you guys were short staffed, and we put our names on the wait list after the rain had cleared. When we did put our names on the list people were already sitting back on the patio. So the rain caused a delay. I understand that, but if food had to be remade, basically you are resetting the clock. For everybody on the wait list. But that was not taken into account when we were given the wait times. we were paitient, but then we started getting the run around by the hostess saying only five or 10 more mintues which was definitely not the case. But this still doesn’t explain open tables for people who requested first available or who didn’t care to sit outside.
Linz
Chris just stop! You obviously have no idea how a restaurant works and have never worked in one.
Y'all need to calm down
Those tables were probably empty because they were short staffed and didn’t want to overload the servers who were there with extra tables. And you don’t know the situation. How do you know they didn’t have more people scheduled and they called out or there was an emergency and couldn’t get to work? They owe us absolutely no explanation as to why they were short staffed, they just were. Shit happens, people. You can plan for perfection, doesn’t mean you’ll get it. Jesus fucking Christ if this is the worst thing to happen in your life consider yourself lucky.
Sierra
Have you ever even worked at a restaurant before, Chris? Do you know some people call in sick, or no call no show on a regular basis? Obviously not. Quit bitching, you’re in the wrong and everyone is calling you out. No matter what you say, you continue to make yourself look more like an idiot.
Paul
that should be tables TURNING over.
Paul
Most restaurants can and do cook at 100% capacity. But that’s with a natural flow and tables running over. When you have a dozen or more tables that seat all at once, that’s when delays begin.
As far as short staffing, don’t be so quick to blame management. Restaurant employees have families too, and need time off, even on holidays. Restaurant managers and employees know they are needed for holidays, but we still have to be fair to our employees. We can’t make them work EVERY holiday. Would YOU do that? So we try to rotate holiday time off.
There is no shortage of restaurant jobs out there, so guess what happens when an employee becomes dissatisfied with their work schedule? Yeah…they leave.
And staffing is not always as easy as you may think. I am in a very popular tourist area, and high transient population. I could hire every single applicant that walks through my doors and STILL be short staffed on the weekends, which brings me to my next question- Want a job? Come on over here. I’ll hire you. It will be fun to see how long you last.
Chris
This whole thing boils down to the wait time was 1 hour it was closer to 2 hours. I never had a restaurant be this far off. Knowing the rain was going to cause delays. If the were accommodating they would have seated us in an open table.
Paul
OK, so suppose they did seat you at an open table. Your wait time until food arrived would not have changed. You have no idea what was happening in the kitchen.
Jen
Fat, angry and stupid rednecks like you are the reason why I stopped working in Panama City Beach a long time ago. Threes no point in trying to make you understand when you can’t even understand a hungry child is not the restaurants problem its yours, among other things. Instead of trying to find a reason in justifying the 10% tip you left you could start by going ahead and admitting now that you’re just a cheap asshole who always has to complain about something.
Chris
Listen you think I am stupid, if we have known it would have been a two hour wait would have turned around and gone somewhere else, we are not that stupid, but we kept getting the run around about just a few more minutes. Yes I got that day off because our business was closed, so the staff could have gotten the day off. But this business decided to stay open to the public. I don’t have a problem with servers wanting time off, but management should have known to adjust for that as well. And regarding the wait times, they knew the rain was going to cause delays, but didn’t adjust the wait times they just gave the standard wait time, but then there were open tables.
proud former server
Ugh…everything you say just reinforces how little you know about the restaurant business. You don’t get it at all.
Do yourself a favor and stop trying.
Eating Popcorn
“Then once we were seated it even made us more upset to see at least ten tables open with more guest waiting to be seated, which we could not understand. ”
Omg this is classic.
Just read the above.
Sometimes you have to wait. You ALWAYS had the option to leave. I have worked at restaurants that have a two to four hour wait, every night, for months. Obviously a restaurant where people choose to wait is making money, doing something right. People who don’t want to wait go elsewhere, it doesn’t hurt the profit margin.
Obviously the reason there were open seats was because of the patio issue. They seem to be very accommodating. I promise you, if they were not accommodating to patrons they would not even have a patio. The place would have still been on a wait, maybe 20 minutes less and they would not allow many modifications to the menu. If you want to be in and out you sacrifice service and special requests.
Don’t take your kids out to eat and agree to wait if they can’t. I would never take my four year old son somewhere and force him to wait to eat. I’m the parent, the restaurant is not responsible for my lack of planning!
Teagan
Which is exactly how you run YOUR restaurant, right?
Chris
Well, first the facts are all wrong. We were in car on Thomas drive stuck in traffic for 20 minutes. The rain was already gone by the time we got to the restaurant. By this time the people on the patio were already back in their seats. So when we put our name down, they should have known that the quoting system was off due to the rain and there would have been longer wait times. So when we were told only an hour, that was fine for our situation even with two kids. Any decent restaurant would have known to adjust the wait times so they could have given a more accurate wait times. Then once we were seated it even made us more upset to see at least ten tables open with more guest waiting to be seated, which we could not understand. If it were larger parties waiting on tables the why couldn’t the restaurant pushed those table together. I have seen this done at many restaurants. Also, about being short staffed it was a holiday weekend, why didn’t mangament recognize this fact and have it appropriately staffed. Even is the severs wanted time off you don’t do that on a holiday weekend.
Emma
To address the empty tables that everybody seems to be very upset about. A kitchen is only so big and there is only so much room to cook, therefore in a effort to not overload the kitchen resturants do not overseat. If they had sat large parties at those tables then that means a large amount of food would be flooding the kitchen at the same time which is what we call a crash. When the kitchen crashes it can cause delays up to an hour to get food after it was ordered. In an attempt to avoid this tables are left unseated. It is a strategy most resturants use, as you said you’d had seen that before.
Chris
Then why even have those tables. If you dont have a big enough kitchen to cook at 100% occupancy, then you shouldn’t have those tables. I meant to say I hadn’t ever seen before or not very often. We ate another restaurant the night before (captain anderson’s) There wasn’t a open table at all and they do have a large dinning room. We didn’t have any problems there. I don’t buy this strategy. If the tables were left open because of short staff then that poor management knowing it’s a holiday weekend to have a short staff regardless of the situation of the staff.
Eating Popcorn
You just don’t understand at all, do you? It’s kinda sad really. It isn’t about the size of the kitchen or the number of staff, it often is about pacing.
You add 10 extra patio tables you have to subtract 10 from the dining room.
Or if all the items that were rained on had to be remade asap, all at once, then that pushes the food ahead of it behind.
So sure, you could have been sat, but you may have waited an hour for food. But I see you don’t want to try and wrap your tiny brain around it. You just want to throw an adult temper tantrum because you are THAT asshole who has a party of 8 on a holiday weekend and fails to make a reservation.
Be responsible for yourself man. And your kids. Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on anyone elses!
Kelly
Are you really here to defend this? And your genius conclusion is “don’t grant servers time off”?
Did YOU get that day off? Cause I bet that caused other people some amount of minor annoyance, but they’re not complaining about that, are they? What if those servers had parents or siblings that lost their lives in war? What if the server themselves were veterans?
“Any decent restaurant would have known to adjust the wait times so they could have given a more accurate wait times.”
And any decent parent would have left and ate at McDonald’s if their kid was that hungry or fussy. Because the decent patent would have did what was best for the kid, not themselves. Sounds like you’d probably enjoy a happy meal more anyhow.
catherine
Why didn’t you make reservations? Do you think a restaurant can accommodate a party of 8 just dropping in instantly? Especially on a holiday weekend? And now you are soo shocked that the place was busy. I’m surprised you didn’t start screaming at the other diners to hurry the fuck up because you and your group of snowflakes want to eat. Quit your whining, there are so many other things in the world to get your panties in a twist about. SMH
Adriane
Listen Chris, being short staffed does not only mean management didn’t schedule people to work, it also means that people call out! Did you think of that?! Maybe, just maybe, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the restaurant didn’t schedule enough people. Shit happens buddy. Also, rain is rain. Whether it happened before or after you got there, they still needed time to fix all of the issues they had from the rain. I bet you said the food was mediocre because you were already pissed about waiting. Bet if you had been sat at the time you were quoted at first, you would’ve loved it! Next time just eat at home. Restaurants need less people like you anyway.
Amanda
How about parents have a standing plan for delays when it comes to feeding their children? Like, say, bringing a snack?
dead_elvis
How dare you expect competence & responsibility from parents towards their fuck-trophies!
miss kitty
It was the “how can you possibly be short staffed?” comment that got to me. Gee lady, we forgot to charge the extra ServerBot 2000s, even though we knew it was Memorial Day weekend, so we just have our regular contingent of Bots on the floor. Our bad.
Laura
We always seem to have people who want the patio when it so about to rain and then complain it is muggy (we have an awning). They forget that we do want to set the patio (it is a pick up as need section in our bar) and we don’t want to be out there all sweaty and gross either.