The Customer Is Always Right, with the Following Exceptions:
The lady who throws a fit because there’s nutmeg in the sauce, and it didn’t say so on the menu, and she doesn’t like nutmeg, and no, she doesn’t want anything else, and she doesn’t expect to pay for the meal either, any of it, including the appetizer and drinks, and by the way it should say right there on the menu all the spices that goes into a dish, because a lot of people don’t like nutmeg.
Her husband, the unhappiest man for miles in every direction, is sorry, really sorry, but can the waitress possibly ask the manager to adjust the check so that he can hear about something else occasionally for the next few weeks?
***
The last guy left in the bar at closing time as we wipe down the bottles and count our drawers and recap the night. He picks a stool close by to listen in while he finishes his drink. His tie’s in his pocket or missing but he’s still in the suit he put on that morning to go to his job down on Wall Street, from the looks of him. He doesn’t say a word. He’s quiet the way drunk people are quiet when they think there’s still a chance you don’t know they’re drunk. No one’s sure if he came here alone or if his friends have left him behind. No one knows if he’s a friend of one of us. No one can even ask because he’s right there, smiling and nodding as we talk about people he doesn’t know and work issues he doesn’t understand. He’s a harmless, lonely young trader and we patiently tolerate his unselfconscious eavesdropping and dopey expression and ignore whatever he’s doing on the bar top with whatever he’s taken out of his coat pocket as we wipe down the bottles and count the drawers and talk shop until his head drops down and he snorts a five-inch line of coke and pulls his head back up to look at us with an innocent grin, because isn’t that what everyone does with complete strangers in a bar at the end of a Thursday night?
***
Andreas L. and Lizzie B., the foodie couple and dedicated Yelpers who found us almost as soon as we opened and for our first year in business keep dropping by to see how we’re coming along, because like all dedicated Yelpers they imagine they have an equally dedicated following who rely on their expert opinion for guidance through the current local restaurant scene. But in their Yelp reviews, Andreas L. and Lizzie B. never mention their dedication to liquor, which is paramount and can hardly sharpen their critical apparatus, since they’re usually a giggling mess before the main course has arrived, and by the time they’ve finished drinking dessert she’s getting ready to piss her pants and he’s making a pass at the busboy.
But they never let you forget that they’re “pretty big Yelpers,” a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. They say it with sincere pride and a genuine delusion of power, as though providing free content to a billion dollar corporation -- the sole qualification for the privilege being ownership of a functional email address -- is a sort of accomplishment rather than a shameful secret on par with frotteurism, and that it endows them with such sway over the dining public that restaurants shift into crisis mode on their arrival. What they should know, but never will, is that restaurants view them as sad and ridiculous at best, and as a dangerous menace to public safety at worst.
But since they don’t know that, try to imagine their shock and confusion upon swerving into our parking lot at five minutes past closing on a Monday night, knocking on the locked door, and being told by the manager that we’re closed, cleaning up, and won’t let them in for a nightcap. The manager doesn’t tell them they’ve been criminally overserved wherever they’re coming from, and that we’re not in the business of topping off drunks for the last few miles home at the risk of every other human life on the road, but I like to think that message came through all the same.
“Not even a quick one?” Lizzie bargains. “You can clean up ‘round us.”
“No, can’t do it. Sorry.”
“Sorry?” says Andreas darkly. “Yeah, you will be sorry.”
And with that, they jump back into the yelpmobile and speed home to the yelpcave to pour a couple more drinks and hammer out two hundred words of justice apiece. Their review updates, both in the key of Look who’s gotten too big for their britches, are accompanied by a rating demotion of a couple stars, and of course make no mention of the state the authors were in when we turned them away.
The reply I write is meant to call them out, to shame and humiliate them in front of the virtual community that gives them oxygen, but I can’t bring myself to post it. Andreas L. and Lizzie B. have freed me of whatever dumb faith I had in the motives and integrity of Yelpers, and I can’t stand the thought of providing the site with anything that might actually be worth reading.
***
The couple who arrive without a reservation at seven-twenty on a Friday night, and on being told that there will be a short wait begin pointing at every unoccupied table they see.
“What about that one?”
“There’s a reservation on that table.”
“Well, how about the booth in the corner?”
“That’s reserved, too.”
“Then why not that one?”
“Reservation.”
“But we’re here, they’re not.”
“That’s what a reservation is for.”
“How many people are on the waitlist right now?”
“There are three parties ahead of you.”
“Can we wait at the bar?”
“Absolutely. Grab a seat and we’ll get you a table as soon—“
“Hey, look at them! They’re almost done with dessert. Can we have their table?”
***
The quiet, intellectual-looking kid who’s the last one you worry about at his friend’s birthday party, an open bar affair, and the vodka & Red Bulled young men shout over the music about post-college life, first jobs, that girl over there, and the room grows loud quickly as everyone tries to get every last nickel’s worth of the twenty-five dollar door charge, which buys three hours of well liquor or beer, and as the volume builds the guys who have the wherewithal to talk with the girls keep getting interrupted by the raging berserkers who don’t but can only grab their brother! around the neck and yell “Look at this guy! I fuckin’ love this guy! Do you know how long I’ve known this fuckin’ guy?” so that it’s natural to have your bartender’s antenna trained on that potential flashpoint and so to ignore the skinny kid with the curly blond hair and glasses skulking around the edges of the room, creepy and gameless, never talking to a girl longer than a minute before she makes some subtle gesture and her girlfriend swoops in to whisk her away, and it’s only when the party’s breaking up and the noise level has come down enough for you to hear the KRR-TOONK KRR-TOONK KRRRRR-TOONK from the men’s room and run in to discover that the skinny young kid in a fit of sexual frustration has found the strength to kick the toilet completely out of the floor and crack the concrete underneath it that you realize you’ve spent the night looking in the wrong direction.
It’s not always the quiet one, but it sure is sometimes.
***
The woman who keeps her waitress at the table for an eternity to quiz her on the allergen potential of every dish.
“Is this gluten-free?”
“It can be if we substitute rice for the couscous."
“What kind of rice?”
“Long-grain wild rice.”
“Okay, but no saffron.”
“No saffron.”
“Now how about this one. Are there onions in it?”
“Yes, but we can leave them out.”
“But are they taking the onions out? Were there onions in there already?”
“No, they’ll make it from scratch without any onions.”
“Now this one here. Does that have eggs?”
“No.”
“Is there any dairy in it? Butter? Milk? Cheese?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure? Can you check to be on the safe side?”
The waitress returns a few minutes later and tells the woman what the chef has said about the dairy, although she has cleaned up his language considerably.
“Okay, I’ll have that then. But remember, no onions!”
As the kitchen printer slowly grinds out the foot-long ticket, loaded with exclusions to give the woman at Table 42 Seat 3 a chance of surviving her meal, the cooks are a chorus of outrage.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
“Seriously?”
“You gotta be shittin’ me.”
The waitress gets an earful every time she passes the line, as if she herself has caused the woman to suffer sensitivities so numerous she belongs inside a plastic bubble. But an hour later the waitress is enough of a professional to appear concerned as she informs the woman that her dessert selection, the chocolate torte, is a deadly trifecta of eggs, flour, and butter.
“Oh that’s okay,” the woman says. “I’m just trying to eat healthy. A little won’t hurt.”
***
The couple in advanced middle age who sit at the bar on their third round of martinis at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. They’ve been here before and never leave as sober as you’d like. His expression is cautious and cynical. He’s unusually short but did well for himself somehow or other, well enough to drive an expensive car but not well enough apparently to let go of the things that made him cautious and cynical.
His wife’s had that surgery some women get that makes them look at you like you just told them an unspeakably filthy joke. But appearances aside, she’s as sunny as she’d have to be to stay married to such a cranky little son-of-a-bitch.
“Hey,” he points at the TV and looks around to see who may have heard him. “Let’s change this.”
“All right,” I say.
“Put on Fox News.”
“Sorry, but no.”
For a moment they think I’m kidding. “Yeah,” he chuckles. “Okay, give me the remote and I’ll put it on.”
“Nope.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I won’t have it on.”
“We’re the only ones watching.”
“Sorry.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not.”
“Don't you know the customer’s always right?”
I don’t respond to that. He looks at his wife in disbelief. She looks as surprised as he does, but then she looked that way coming in.
“Well, you just lost our business,” he tells me. “Never heard of anything like it.”
Ten minutes later, he asks the bartender for another round. Principle is one thing, but it’s hard to find a decent bar in our neighborhood that’s open on a Sunday afternoon. I’ve probably seen them a dozen times since then.
