12 years as a part-time waitress; this is all too familiar to me.

But I think the article confuses two separate phenonemena. I don't think asking about your food sourcing or preparation, within reason, is at all annoying. Especially if you're polite. I actually liked it when diners asked where we got the seafood or meat or how things were made, mainly because I was lucky enough to only work in places where things were sourced thoughtfully and largely housemade. Also, if you ask for a substitution and the restaurant allows substitutions and has ready options, I think that's fine too. Some restaurants don't, which is theirs to decide. I don't think these questions and small customizations are "fussiness."

Fussiness is demanding unique treatment to a degree which causes a significant deviation from normal routines and an undue level of attention to be lavished on one customer above others. Getting finicky over whether water is room temperature or "still cool" is in that category.

When you eat out, there is an implicit contract between diners and a restaurant, and that includes a certain level of personal service that one can reasonably expect. That level varies with the market position and pricing of the restaurant, naturally. However, a restaurant is a business, and the business model is based on being able to prepare food and drink for a certain number of people at a certain number of tables per night to a certain standard of service for a certain price point. The staffing and service quality level matches that expectation of covers served per night, which in turn is based on a calculation of how many tables/people servers and cooks and bartenders can adequately serve well. At some point, the level of service a person might be demanding can become outscale for this equation, causing the system to choke.

It's not a reasonable expectation to dine out and expect to have everything you could possibly wish for exactly prepared just for you, as your loving Nonna would at home, doing the equivalent of cutting off your bread crusts and picking offending raisins out of rolls, especially when it deviates from what the restaurant has planned for as its normal scope of service. Once you begin asking for that, you're really asking for a level of service you're not paying for - a level of service you could only really expect in a private banquet setting where you have contracted the staff and are paying appropriately, or in your own home where you have hired the staff and can dictate the terms.

The fad diets are part of this. My last waitressing stint was at the height of Atkins, and oh my God. People were ridiculous. If I had $5 for every one of those people that gave me and our kitchen a miserable time over Atkins preparation who is still on that diet today, I might actually have $5. But probably not. People are nutty about their food, they're really just kind of crazy when it comes to food, and you see every flavor of that crazy when you work in a restaurant. My position is: it's fine to be crazy, but there's a pretty narrow range of things you can expect when you choose to dine out. If you can't work within that range, you're best off not eating out, because it's not an experience designed for you.

In real life, those like Missan’s family who witness interrogations often overtip as a way to apologize. At American Seasons, for example, cringing companions sometimes surreptitiously leave an extra $20.

That's me. See also: getting physically ill when dining companions have loud conversations on subjects not appropriate for a restaurant.

I always have to ask if there's alcohol in food if it's not detailed on the menu.

The one time I fell foul of this was at TPS's bachelorette party and the grilled lamb chops I ordered - from a menu that otherwise had very detailed descriptions of the ingredients in each dish - came with an unmentioned wine sauce poured over the meat. I had to send it back and explain that I couldn't have alcohol. I wouldn't have ordered it otherwise. But the server was apologetic and agreed that, yes, the sauce should have been mentioned, and the kitchen prepared some more chops for me without the sauce. For me it's not a question of being picky, the effect alcohol has on me is potentially deadly.

Generally I find that most restaurants these days offer such a wide range of dishes that, if I'm on a no-carbs diet, I can order from the menu without a problem. One of my favourite diner breakfasts is the fruit and cottage cheese platter that they all seem to do, and it's not usually a problem to order, say, roast chicken and ask for extra vegetables in place of the roast potatoes.

And yes, I'm with Melismata in that rudeness to service people is a deal-breaker.

Rudeness is a deal breaker, period. Also racism, cruelty, unkindness, and narcissism.

I was a tough date, I guess.

There's nothing wrong with asking questions and expecting things to be as they are described (and "as described" seems to me to include things like obvious omissions in description, like Senyar very reasonably sending back something with an undescribed sauce), or asking very detailed questions about ingredients.

It's not the server's job or the chef's(or the caterer's, which is an area where I have much more experience) to decide whether a diner's stated sensitivities are frivolous. If they can't accommodate the diner's requests or give detailed enough info, that's one thing: to unilaterally decide to misinform or to deliver something other than described is willfully bad service.

On the other side, the diner has a similar duty to be appreciative of the efforts made by waitstaff and the kitchen, and not to assume that their requests are easy to accommodate.

A minor example: I was in the middle of ordering a tableful of small plates when I noticed that the "vegetable tempura" (which I planned to shared with a vegetarian) listed also included shrimp. When I said "Oh --- oops, instead we'll have ---" and started to pick another plate instead. If I'd noticed earlier, I wouldn't have hesitated to ask "Is it possible to get this without the shrimp?" The flipside: I also wouldn't have grumbled if the server said no. Maybe the kitchen is busy, maybe they have a no-substitutions policy, maybe a lot of things.

As it was, our server volunteered that the kitchen happily make an all-veg plate for us. That was great service and very much appreciated, probably all out of proportion for such a simple accommodation.

It's not the server's job or the chef's(or the caterer's, which is an area where I have much more experience) to decide whether a diner's stated sensitivities are frivolous

I don't mean to imply that it's the restaurant's job to decide anything about a specific diner (though it's human to speculate and people certainly do, front and back of house, as well as right there at the table as a family member!).

Just that restaurants do what restaurants do, and they are sometimes limited in their capacity to change the plan for individual requests at the point of service, and it's best to begin with that assumption when dining out. It's not these polite little easily resolved incidents that are the problem for staff, it's when diners - as so many do - get vocally miffed and irate when a restaurant staffer says "I'm sorry, we can't manage that," as they sometimes have to when faced with a special request.

Restaurants live or die by routine, and they have to make plans for the majority rather than the outliers. They can often tweak things a bit to one direction or another, and in general most chefs can easily leave off a sauce, leave out the meat, swap a side for a side, and sometimes leave out dairy or salt, but can't always cater fully to an individual. So much is pre-prepped, and some things can't be reversed on short order. One of the restaurants I worked in for a few years was famous for its incredible local seafood, which was the bulk of the menu. Believe it or not, we would occasionally have people come in and say they had a shellfish allergy. In that restaurant, we simply said there was absolutely no way, given the size of the kitchen and the busy pace of the service, that we could guarantee that nothing on their plate had at some point been touched by a surface or utensil that had come into contact with shellfish. They could order or not, we made the risk was known to them, but we could not guarantee that any dish we prepared would be free of shellfish molecules. That restaurant could just not accommodate those outliers. It sometimes pissed people off, but better that they were aware than that we tried to fob it off and let them order a pork chop, when the butter used to pan-fry the pork chop might have actually been contaminated because the butter ladle is also used to spoon butter into the lobster pan. When you are an outlier, understanding this kind of thing and taking the polite approach usually goes much farther than the "Well I never!" approach.

This really doesn't apply to the nice polite people like yourselves. I know it would be hard for anyone who never did table service to imagine, but people can be really, truly awful sometimes.

IT's not even that restaurants are truly unresponsive. When something becomes a major trend, like Atkins did for a while and local or gluten-free is now, restaurants gradually adapt their menus to meet market demand. It's just that planning, ordering, and preparation time, and also evidence that the new market consistently exists and will be around long enough to be worth adapting to, are needed.

*One good tip for unusual diets, if you know where you're having the meal ahead of time, is to head it off at the pass by calling early in the day you'll be there to ask about adaptations. It makes a world of difference to give the kitchen the heads-up, and gives them time to pull something out of the freezer or to bake something special for you. Given time, a lot can be accommodated. But trying for a custom order in the midst of the 7 PM rush will not result in as much success.

If you can't work within that range, you're best off not eating out, because it's not an experience designed for you.

Thank you so much for this quote!! I'm SO repeating it to a few people I know.

I don't mean to imply that it's the restaurant's job to decide anything about a specific diner (though it's human to speculate and people certainly do, front and back of house, as well as right there at the table as a family member!).

My remark wasn't aimed at you at all, but at the article itself. For example:

In April, David Chang, the New York chef, put “fake allergies’’ (along with “special food requests’’) on his “Top 5 Most Annoying Things Customers Do’’ list[...] “There are a lot of people who have a legitimate allergy,’’ she says, “but others feel it’s something that makes them gain weight. People get very anxious about what they are putting in their bodies.’’

My point is that David Chang is well within his rights to decline the requests, but that he doesn't have the necessary information to know why those customers are making them in the first place: maybe an "allergy" is shorthand for a strong aversion, a phobia, a religious restriction, a medical restriction, or even, as he sugested, a slimming concern --- or maybe it's an actual allergy he's never heard of. If (for example) Senyar described her need to avoid alcoholic ingredients as "an allergy," that would make sense to me.

I agree that it's a long-standing tradition (and sometimes a necessity for peace of mind) to roll eyes at customers' seemingly inane requests. And as I said above:

On the other side, the diner has a similar duty to be appreciative of the efforts made by waitstaff and the kitchen, and not to assume that their requests are easy to accommodate.

I waited tables and worked food service of various kinds long enough to know how remarkably weird people can be about food and restaurants, and I agree that too many people are rude and thankless. But one of the things I'm most thankful for is when servers don't second-guess the logic for whatever special request a diner may be making: when they assume that the person making the request or asking the questions might actually know what they're asking for.

At the Japanese lunch I described above, I wondered if my waiter was rolling his eyes at me: I balked at shrimp, but then ordered a mackerel roll among our maki. But he doesn't have enough information to know: am I allergic to shrimp? Am I trying to eat sustainable seafood only? Does shrimp just give me the willies? He'll never know.

And it doesn't matter if he knows why: all he needed to do was tell me yes or no, and it's my duty to accept that answer civilly and decide what to do accordingly.

Huh, that's weird: I thought I'd submitted a comment (and seen it posted) but now it's gone. I'll try to reconstruct it.

I think I probably sound strident about this, when I'm actually just trying to look at some different angles. Miko, I think you and I agree mostly: requests (which might be declined) are fine; demands are not okay.

I think this becomes a problem when someone (on either side, diner or server/chef) decides that the other is [foolish/stubborn/not sensible] to [make/refuse] that request. In short, when people work on assumptions, not communication.

Which is pretty much the model for How Things Go Wrong, innit?

requests (which might be declined) are fine; demands are not okay.

Pretty much, yes. And requests can turn into demands. Or people can turn into a pill when their requests aren't met, sometimes.

I think this becomes a problem when someone (on either side, diner or server/chef) decides that the other is [foolish/stubborn/not sensible] to [make/refuse] that request.

I guess that is objectively true as a transactional analysis, but I would just add to this that when it comes down to a debate on restaurant vs. diner, the weight is really on the diner to recognize that special custom orders for things that are not on the menu just aren't what restaurants are set up to do, and concede the point politely, even if it's not what they'd have wished.

In other words, for the most part, it's a lot more difficult for the restaurant to be the unreasonable one, because they have made a public offer of doing Thing X, and those who accept the offer, but then ask for Thing Y, are the more unreasonable.

To arrive at an equivalent reversal of what often happens with finicky restaurant diners who want to special-order a lot of things, you'd have to imagine the restaurant doing something like asking a customer - after they'd arrived and sat down - to pay their bill in all $1 and $5 bills, because you need the change. Or to share their table with some strangers, because you want to save space to squeeze more people in later. Or to use only a spoon and fork on their steak, because it's been decided that knives cause too many lacerations in the kitchen when the dishwashers handle them. Something really out of the ordinary like that - because restaurants do in the ordinary, using a structured menu, and diverging from that is always a special request which can reasonably be denied, whatever the reason.

But how does the diner know what's reasonable or possible* unless they ask? Some requests are really impossible, but someone who's never worked in a kitchen might not know (for example) that your seafood restaurant can't promise no cross-contamination.

That's a great example, by the way, of what I'm commending as good practice on the part of the restaurant: frankly and politely telling the customer that their request is too taxing or frankly impossible and they'd be better off dining elsewhere. (But I'm also sympathetic to anyone who politely asks, because I can well imagine it's a drag being the reason your whole party has to forego lobster rolls.)

Above all, I expect servers and chefs to be honest, as I always was as a server and a caterer, but I have been disappointed. If I make a special request (which is pretty rare) or if I ask about ingredients, I want an honest answer. Countless times during my vegetarian days, my polite question "Is that vegetarian?" was answered with assurances, but when my food arrived, there was bacon floating in it or it was clearly made with beef broth, because the server or kitchen either didn't know or decided my question wasn't important. If they had been honest (or even said "I don't know"), I would simply have ordered something else.

*And for me, that's usually how I phrase it on the rare occasions when I make a special request: "Is it possible to get the Cobb Salad without the blue cheese, or should I just order something else?" I can't eat blue cheese, but I know many restaurants make up salads in advance, so I don't assume they can accommodate my preference. But if I request that, and they cheerfully agree to accommodate me, and then my salad shows up with blue cheese on it, I'm A) sending it back politely and B) probably never coming to that restaurant again.

and B) probably never coming to that restaurant again.

I take it back, that's too strong. It's easy to send out a dish the way you've sent it out a thousand times before.

But if I get an eyeroll for sending it back after the server cheerfully told me my request was no problem, then I'll probably never dine there again.

But how does the diner know what's reasonable or possible* unless they ask?

Oh, no, I'm totally 100% in favor of always asking. And in any place worth its salt, the server will know, comprehensively, or they will find out. That's a fair bargain.

my polite question "Is that vegetarian?" was answered with assurances, but when my food arrived, there was bacon floating in it

Yeah...some restaurants and servers fall down on the job sometimes. It continues to astonish me how chefs, who are generally big food-hounds, are really often totally illiterate about things like calorie control, or ideas like "So actually, vegetarians avoid not only the obvious large 6-oz chunks of protein, but also any ingredient derived from animal protein, such as the veal stock you make the risotto in." It's worth asking and, in fact, saying things like "By 'vegetarian' I mean no meat products, even broth". Chefs are focused on certain facts and qualities about food, and not always on food restrictions.

I think it's totally reasonable to be PO'd if you've done due diligence on checking out the ingredients and still got what you didn't want. There were some times as a server that I dutifully communicated the conditions to the kitchen, and when I brought the food out and then came back to check, found out that the cooks, out of habit, had still included the bacon bits or whatever. It's fodder for true chagrin-ation, because sure, the kitchen should have fulfilled that request, made clearly enough.

But I also understand how, in the heat of service, they just made "SPAG CARB" the way they always make "SPAG CARB" without noting the small-print "NO BAC" underneath, even though I stopped in to make sure they saw it, because between my stopping in and the 30 dishes they made before preparing this one, they just...forgot, and they just made it the way they always made it, reptile brain and all, because it's not the normal preparation. I, as a server, have a role in giving it a visual check, but if it's something that doesn't show -- or I'm equally busy -- errors are possible.

I guess I'm just arguing "allow for the possibility of error, allow for the restaurant to make it up to you as best they can, allow for the reality that maybe they can't make it up completely" -- because in my service time, I'd say about 99% of the normal-menu dishes come out correct - maybe missing a garnish or so or having a wrong side at the worst - while maybe 60 or 70% of special order dishes come out correct the first time, because they require a deviation from a finely honed and rather militarized machine.

It's not the normal problems and normal corrections that become issues for this kind of article. Honestly, many diners are quite nice and understanding, as I'm sure you are. They are not what this article is about. This article is seeking to document an increase in the unreasonable expectation of customization and a concomitant nastiness on the part of the disproportionately self-aggrandizing consumer. But I would say that it goes about it clumsily, revealing an unfamiliarity with what questions to ask.

Melismata, I really love the quote you opened this with! It sums up for me how we all are easy-going about some things, vigilant about others, and sometimes kinda zany about a very few others.

But otherwise, I thought this article was a fairly sloppy opportunity to make light of dietary restrictions and personal dietary choices. I agree wholeheartedly, Miko, that restaurants are designed to cater to the majority and that an inconsiderate minority can drag a server's evening to a screeching halt.

But (as a pretty enthusiastic near-omnivore who's almost never inconvenienced by a menu) I'm frankly tired of hearing some vocal chefs complain about people's personal needs or choices as if they were insufferably precious, or who feel it's perfectly okay to slip in ingredients they've agreed to leave out rather than telling the diner that they can't produce the dish without [stock/proscuitto/breadcrumbs/shellfish]. It's not only disrespectful; in some cases, it's dangerous, and the chef isn't competent to decide which cases those are. The diner is.

I sympathize --- I really do! --- with the need to keep a professional kitchen streamlined and standardized, and I agree that any restaurant has the right to refuse to alter or substitute dishes. (My favorite restaurant has a great-sounding sandwich I've never ordered because they don't o substitutions on it and there's an ingredient I can't stomach. But that's their call to make!)

But I am singularly unimpressed by chefs who mock or dismiss the dietary choices (voluntary or otherwise) of their potential patrons. Hey, Anthony Bourdain: you think that vegetarians are bloodless joyless fussbudgets? Well, I (an occasional but enthusiastic meat-eater) think a chef who can't cook without meat is hopelessly hobbled by his own prejudices, his paucity of imagination, or his shallow training. I know plenty of gifted chefs who view the restrictions of common dietary problems and choices as a challenge and a chance to expand their menus; I will give them my money, attention, and appreciation.

It's worth asking and, in fact, saying things like "By 'vegetarian' I mean no meat products, even broth".

True, and here I used "is it vegetarian" as a stand-in for the more specific questions I would ask about specific dishes, e.g., "Is that made with vegetable broth or is it meat?" or "Does that have anchovy in the sauce?" But that's a red herring*; my irritation doesn't stem from errors, but from discourtesy or misinformation.

*"Excuse me, is there red herring in this soup?"

a chef who can't cook without meat is hopelessly hobbled by his own prejudices, his paucity of imagination, or his shallow training

Sure, maybe, but maybe that's just what s/he wants to do and put out into the world, and that's the way they want to run their business, even after much thought and not necessarily laziness or limitation. The chefs I've worked with have all had very specific ideas about what kind of food they were most interested in offering. It's nothing to do with their knowledge or skill so much as their own opinions, politics, artistry, and desires. It's as indidivual as making textile art or painting or music or film - each brings their vision into existence, as best they can.

I guess my point is that it's their business to run, as chefs and/or owners, and their choices to make, and individuals in the marketplace can individually choose to endorse that offering by dining there, or choose something else. There's room for Au Pied de Cochon and there's room for vegetarian restaurants, and as long as no one expects one to meet the market demands of the other, there's a lot of room for indivuals to find something that makes them happy.

It's when one expects the other to make them happy that trouble can be predicted. There's something about the growing popular expectation that any and every restaurant, regardless of ethnicity, concept, location, or niche, can please every diner through adaptation, that seems to me simply unrealistic - as unrealistic as the expectation that any clothing store should carry something to suit every taste in fabric, style, and size.

It's as indidivual as making textile art or painting or music or film - each brings their vision into existence, as best they can.

That's a fair comparison. I'm respectful of artists who choose to limit their media for whatever reason --- and I'd be equally put off by an artist who spoke that dismissively and reductively about patrons who aren't receptive to their art.

As I've said numerous times above, I absolutely agree that chefs and restaurateurs should establish their policies, for whatever reason: artistic vision, price model, efficiency, or simply by fiat. And then customers should respect those boundaries (which does not mean they can't ask, but no one is in a position to insist).

I am only saying: it's lovely when they offer a bit of that respect back by not actually mocking customers who have similar restrictions imposed upon them. This article undermines that by framing those requests as largely frivolous. Admittedly, sometimes they are --- but sometimes they aren't, and only the diner can know.

I think it's possible we're talking past each other.