Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind, And Out Of Patience

My sister and I arrive two hours early for our theater show, and we decide we have time for a nice dinner before the show. We walk to a sports bar/cafe that does a full dinner menu about a block away and tell the hostess that we are there for dinner.

Hostess: “There is about a fifteen-minute wait for tables. Is that okay?”

Me: “Sure, that’s fine.”

We settle in to wait, and about ten minutes later they seat us in an area they don’t normally use for dinner. They seat another couple nearby, as well.

No one comes by to take our orders, not even just the drink orders. Fifteen minutes after we have been seated, with no luck flagging down a server, I get up and try to grab who I think is the floor manager, but as soon as he sees someone approaching, he runs away to the kitchen. We resume trying to flag down a server to find out who is supposed to be covering our section, but they are all “too busy” to bother with a table that isn’t theirs.

By the time we’ve been sitting there for a half-hour without even a glass of water, I’m just done. We’re approaching the point where, if our orders aren’t in the kitchen, we won’t get our food in time to make our show. 

We decide to leave, and I stop to talk to the hostess on the way out.

Me: “Look. We’ve been sitting where you put us for a half-hour and no one has even come by to take our drink orders. We’re just going to leave and go somewhere else. Someone needs to check in with the other couple, too.”

Hostess: “Wait. You can’t leave without ordering once you’ve been seated; it will throw off our numbers on the computer.”

Me: “Not my problem.”

And with that, we left, went around the corner to a quick-serve place, and managed to make it to our show on time. This was the final straw — they had also recently changed the menu and the new offerings were less to our taste than the old ones — and we haven’t been back since.