Have you ever been so upset/pissed-off/disappointed with a restaurant that you decided to place a firm moratorium against it?
An ‘I wouldn’t go back there if they paid me!” kind of experience?
I know the feeling, having recently endured a situation so maddening it caused me to say “Sayonara!” to a particular area establishment.
Bear with me, this gets a bit complicated…
Two to three times a week for the last seven years I would have lunch at a small & simple café along the western reaches of the Main Line. With every visit, I’d call and pre order my “usual” – a tasty wrap having one modification. “Instead of Romaine” I asked the owner sometime during Year One, “Can you instead substitute collard leaf?”
Hey, I was trying to do the healthy thing for a change.
For the next six and a half years, I enjoyed my “Usual” in peace. When she answered the phone, it was always soon waiting for me, and if a new counter person took the order, I’d gently indicate my leafy predisposition. When they moved on I’d nicely repeat the request to the next hire.
All throughout my lunch time forays at this little café, all was hunky-dory & collard-y.
It’s operated by a pleasant, primly reserved woman. I’ve always admired the quality of her products and the uniqueness of her business model. Throughout the years, she was certainly friendly enough.
Her partner-at-work is her partner-in-life, a talky-but-means-well dude who owns his own company, who rarely visits the café and when he does, he stays out of her way.
When I would see him there, he’d usually engage me in banter, a salt of the earthy kind of guy.
And so it began…
Flash back with me to April of this year:
After calling in for my “Usual” and arriving as I had done hundreds of times before, He-partner was at the counter while She-partner was prepping food in the back.
Instead of a smile or the typical “Hi, Ken,” I was greeted with a scowl and a problem – “Ken, we don’t do anything special for the customer!” he barked at me.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about?” he mimicked patronizingly. “I hear you always want a special order. We don’t do that! Not for anybody!”
I was so taken aback, not because my lunch was being somehow diminished. No, it was the attitude, the unprovoked attack against me like I was somehow trying to undermine their operation or deliberately elevate food costs. In all my years of dining out, in all the places I’ve been to, nobody had ever treated me so rudely. (Not even in Paris.)
I tried to explain that they could a. Charge me extra for the greens, or b. Not serve them to me, but do so nicely.
Apparently, someone had woken up on the wrong side of the day, because he persisted. “We just don’t do anything special for the customer!”
My final words to him – and her (she remained hidden away in the back kitchen the whole time in avoidance-mode) were “I’ll be sure to tell everybody then that you ‘don’t do anything special for the customer!’” As I was about to depart, the inanity of it all really hit me. “Really, all this over the type of lettuce I prefer on my wrap? Really??”
I stormed out and never returned.
Four months passed and I kept stewing over that terrible moment. I had never felt so abused and mistreated in what is supposed to be a professional setting. Dark thoughts and hurt feelings nagged at me constantly until one day, it came to me – I realized what I had to do.
I wrote them a conciliatory email letter.
In it, I stated that I wanted to put the negativity aside and instead, start over.
I was seeking to take the high road, begin anew. I had realized that even the nicest people can have the worst of days.
It was a letter intended to shore up the ridiculous rift that had occurred there and more pointedly, it was a cleansing mechanism intended to rid my life of the mean-spirits that haunted me every time I heard his hurtful words resounding in my mind, or worse, her back turned silently away from me.
Did I ever get a response?
No.
Does it matter?
Not really.
I never expected one from people who don’t believe in doing anything special for the customer.
Do you have a particular experience that has caused you to ban a particular restaurant? Feel free to share it here!
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