Halloween, a time of ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night, seems like an appropriate time to focus on Restaurant Horror Stories.
Here are tales of incompetent waiters, indifferent managers, abusive customers and terrifying lapses in judgment. It’s enough to make you order carryout.
But don’t, or I’ll have nothing to write about next year.
Special requests
Not all of us eat the same things. Some of us have allergies, aversions or other issues. Which is fine. But it helps to let the restaurant staffers know about them in advance.
A waiter recalls the night at Trio when a woman ordered lobster. As is customary at Trio, the meat was removed, cooked and replaced in the lobster shell, with a couple of lemongrass “antennae” jutting out for looks.
Well, the customer, in the words of the waiter, “just lost it. `This is an animal!’ she screamed, and she got really irate. The whole room heard it. The weird thing was that she had ordered it from the a la carte menu.”
Even advance notice is not without problems. Rick Tramonto of Brasserie T remembers a customer armed with a three-page list of 87 items she could not eat, was allergic to, or otherwise objected to. Tramonto went to the table, said “Why don’t you tell me what you can eat?,” and cobbled together a dinner consisting entirely of seedless fruits, olive oil and root vegetables.
Service faults
Awful service stays in the memory for a long, long time. Two readers are still seething over a dinner “some years ago” in a four-star Chicago restaurant:
“I ordered rack of lamb; my husband ordered tournedos. When the waiter brought our entrees, he served us both tournedos. When we pointed out the error, he left my husband’s entree and assured us that I would be served in a matter of minutes. I encouraged my husband to begin eating, and even though he ate slowly, he was long finished when my rack of lamb arrived, and my husband sat unhappily while I ate. The mood was definitely lost. We expressed our displeasure, but apparently too politely, as no effort was made to make amends.”
Another complained of shabby treatment in a DuPage County restaurant with an odd definition of “child-friendly”: “There were 15 family members in our party. A half-hour passed with no sign of a waitress; I had a 2-year-old and a 5-month-old with me, and the one and only high chair had a broken strap and a tray that wouldn’t lock. Needless to say, the 2-year-old got especially antsy, but when we complained, the owners yelled that we shouldn’t have ordered off the menu, and `next time pay for a baby-sitter.’ We left in a huff, after saying a few choice words to the owners.”
And here’s an import from New York City: “I was entertaining clients at one of the city’s finest restaurants. Just as our dinner was being served, I noticed a large cockroach crawling up the wall. I discreetly alerted the waiter to its presence; he proceeded to shout `Oh! A roach!,’ whipped off his shoe and smashed it. Then he served our dinner, which none of us ate.”
Inauspicious beginnings
Just before the opening of Prairie restaurant in what was then the Omni Morton Hotel, the restaurant invited area VIPs to come in for a free meal one Tuesday night. The invitation neglected, however, to mention that all that was available was the breakfast menu. The 250 people who showed up for dinner were greeted with trays of croissants, while chef Stephen Langlois frantically tried to make eggs Benedict for 250 in a temporary kitchen. “We were doing damage control for weeks on that one,” recalls then-partner Dan Rosenthal.
Private-party income is a welcome sight to any restaurant, but it can be a major boost to a new place. So Debbie Sharpe was thrilled to host an Art Institute luncheon at her new place, Confusion.
The lunch was Oct. 4. Confusion opened to the public in mid-November. Early October, then, found the restaurant still under construction.
So workers washed windows and frantically vacuumed up, while Sharpe had the luncheon cooked at Eat Your Hearts Out, another restaurant she owned. The food was schlepped over and the luncheon came off acceptably. A smiling Sharpe bid her guests adieu — as she brushed construction dust from their clothing.
Gall hall of fame
When things go wrong in a restaurant, customers have the right — even the duty — to complain. But some take their sense of justice a bit far.
At the Signature Room at the 95th, one customer showed up already irate. Seems she had caught and broken her heel on a sidewalk crack outside the John Hancock Center. She demanded that the 95th pay for the damage. (They didn’t.)
Dan Rosenthal, owner of Trattoria No. 10, recalls an incident last winter: “An inebriated young lady walked in to meet some friends. At 7:30, she got up to leave and couldn’t find her coat. She screamed that we had lost or stolen her coat, then stole a leather coat from the coat check and ran out — the coatcheck girl couldn’t catch her.
“We had to explain to a guy who had just spent $1,000 on a private party that his coat had been stolen. Fortunately, the drunken lady had left without her purse, so we knew who she was. We finally sorted it out. And we found her coat stashed under a banquette; she had never checked it.”
Finally, also at the 95th, one highly dissatisfied customer let the whole room know about it. She complained and yelled the whole way from her table to the elevator. Then she played her trump card. “I’m from the Tribune,” she announced, “and you’ve just been reviewed!”
No, they hadn’t, because no, she wasn’t.
