"mess" news and stories

Messy table. Photo: Jason Rosenberg, flickr

Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the tenth in a series of posts.

As a server, I should have boundless patience with my fellow overworked, undertipped brethren. But as anyone who's dined out with servers knows, food industry pros are often the harshest critics of front-of-the-house shenanigans.

Since servers know how restaurants work, they know exactly who to blame for the mishaps that spoil their eating-out experience. The French onion soup's taking too long? That's so not the fault of the server (many of whom would probably be thrilled to pack all three courses in to-go containers and send their table on its way). The halibut doesn't taste good? That's likely the reason the server skips the employee meal.

Diners should never discount their tips for things beyond the server's control: A corked bottle of wine, too long of a wait at the host stand and dirty bathrooms are comment card fodder, not tip-lowering offenses. But there are certain server behaviors for which I'll almost always knock down a gratuity a few percentage points.

At Blogging Baby, there is a bit of a debate going on as to whether it is necessary to clean up after your kids in a restaurant. Karen was busy cleaning up the mess that her 10-month old daughter was making at the table, when a women from a nearby table not to bother, saying,  "The wait staff are going to clean up after us anyway.  I just leave them a big tip and let them do it.  It is, after all, what they're paid to do."

I appreciate the fact that she at least said she leaves a big tip, but I think that that is the wrong idea to have. Does she let her kids throw food around and smear it on the table at home? Asking for a vacuum is going too far, but it's a restaurant, not a day care. Is it so difficult to sop up spilled juice with a few extra napkins?

Source

Sales of long pasta like spaghetti and linguini are down at Tesco, the UK's top grocery chain. The decline in popularity comes from young diners opting for shorter pasta because they can't eat the long strands without getting sauce all over themselves, Tesco says. Not surprisingly, demand for short pasta like penne and has gone up. "Unfortunately some younger British diners appear to lack the same culinary skills that their parents have which is why we've had to tailor our new range accordingly," a Tesco spokesperson told Food Business Review.