The scene is a fine-dining restaurant. An irate customer calls over his waiter and demands to know what a fly is doing in his soup. "It looks like the backstroke," the waiter calmly replies.
So goes one of the more famous "There's a fly in my soup!" jokes. In real life, sending back a dish is not such a witty affair. Often, it's just as nerve-racking to the customer as it is to the restaurant. Even people who are extremely familiar with the industry will hesitate, blaming themselves for ordering the wrong thing or being afraid to question the way a kitchen prepares a certain dish.
But sometimes a dish does need to be sent back to the kitchen. Daily Fork found this video, which, in one-minute, explains just the type of diplomacy needed to correctly send food back:
the video doesn't cover is what to do when it comes to
common restaurant mistakes -- the gray zone of food return -- such as when a customer
orders a burger with all condiments on the side only to
find mayonnaise on the bun.
A good unofficial rule is this: If it doesn't concern the main part of the meal,
let it slide. The burger is the entree and therefore returnable but if the fries that were bad/cold/undercooked, don't return them.
In the above burger example, since it only takes a moment to toast a new bun, I would just
take off the offending bun and ask for a new one. By only returning the bun, you give the kitchen less "ammo" to
work with. Sad to say, but some cooks will express frustration in an unpleasant way if they believe a customer has unfairly returned a dish. When
it's a choice between mayonnaise and saliva, take the mayonnaise.
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Be careful when sending your food back. You may get that added "special sauce".
So You Want To Be a Banquet Manager
When it's a choice between mayonnaise and saliva, take the mayonnaise
That would be an extremely stupid move on the ccok's part given the relative ease of getting DNA testing done these days. If I even suspected there was "saliva" in my food, I'd simply ask for a to-go box (they're going to say no?) and have the evidence neatly packed up for my lawyer. I'd wind up owning the restaurant AND getting a nice chunk of that cook's wages for the rest of his or her life.
I never send things back unless mayonnaise is involved. The merest hint of the stuff and I turn blue. Otherwise I just suck it up, choke it down, and blog about it later.
Thanks for the coaching, although I don't necessarily agree with the "If it doesn't concern the main part of the meal, let it slide" statement.
How about some additional coaching on how to deal with a l o n g delay in service ?
I have tried different approaches:
a) signal the waiter, ask for an update
b) track down the manager, ask for an update
c) walk into the kitchen and yell:
"Hey Chef, where's my food !?! "
I've had to send back many a meal in my days of non-dairyism, and dont remember ever having a problem. After the first couple of times, I learned to ask ahead of time at places like Mexican and Italian restaurants if there was any dairy on the dish I was ordering that wasn't mentioned specifically on the menu. That helped.
These days, I've noticed that due to food allergies in general, restaurants are more savvy about the descriptions in menus. That helps. The only recent issue I had was at Cheesecake Factory, and it was almost 2 years ago. So they even might've fixed that. ::shrugs:: It's not my fault dairy gave me zits! (Big, horrendous, awful to deal with ones...not just little ones that go away in a couple of days.) Believe me, if I'd had a choice, I would've chosen to be able to eat dairy, fo sho!
My sister hates mayo with a passion...she'd probly rather have the saliva if someone fucked up and sent her a bun slathered in mayo, no joke.
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