if your server is doing this it’s because innumerable people before you have managed to fuck up eating out
We like to sit you down, and show you a menu. We take pride on our chewable, edible food. These little fellers here are silverware.
This (gestures expansively to a cup) is what we here like to call a cup! It’s frequently used to hold liquids such as water, which is exactly what I’ve just poured into it.
“Honey, they have drinking bowls with handles!”
“Babe, I think this place might be out of our price range. Why can’t we just go to the place with tableside hamster bottles again?”
“Unlike many other restaurants, we offer a choice of beverages other than water. Some of those beverages will intoxicate you.”
What if I don’t want my water in a “cup”?
You will leave this establishment immediately, you barbarous doorknob. 🫵😤👉
Neat!
My experience:
“Oh, well, here you need to download an app, consent to everything the app wants to do and register with your phone number. Then you can order and walk to the kitchen to pick up the food you ordered. Also, leave a tip if you enjoyed the service.”
At least around where I am, the places that use an app provide a tablet with that app to order on.
That would be ideal. The place I visited did not provide any such options.
I would walk out and never return to any place that forces me to install an app
we have something called a menu which you can choose your food from
Now before you get your food, you’re definitely gonna wanna make sure you have the mechanics down, so I’d like everyone to just open and close their mouths a few times, get those jaw muscles good and warm because let me tell you, if you haven’t had food before, you don’t know how much you’re going to need them in a second
That man isn’t stealing your scraps or homeless, he’s just bussing your table.
The ones that amuse me are the restaurants that don’t do table service, but still have a multiple staff on the floor and door seemingly only to tell diners they don’t do table service.
“All you have to do is scan a qr code, sit on your phone for 5-10 minutes to figure out our menu system, get water for yourself at the station over there, get your own silverware, pick up drinks at the bar, grab this vibrating puck, and pick up food on the other side of the restaurant. Don’t forget to tip!”
Is this still common or are people beating a dead horse?
The whole QR code thing was big during the pandemic but every restaurant in my city deactivated their QR menu and setup.
I say that as a person who loves ordering from a QR and just having the server bring it over. Fight me.
I’ve still seen it quite a few times. It’s only annoying when it’s the only option to order.
The worst one was when they got mad at us for making 20 separate orders (group of 20 everyone orders on their own phone). Apparently we were supposed to take half an hour passing 1 phone around hoping the shitty webapp doesn’t wipe our order.
I guess they wanted to be able to auto add gratuity to your large party and totally agree with you. I personally don’t mind the QR code when it is just me or one other person.
It’s been so long since I’ve eaten out, but I feel like I’ve seen QR codes quite recently.
One was a yoga studio. I saw yoga happening (big plate glass windows at street level so it was hard to miss), and on a whim I thought “Well this seems like a nice place”. A teacher was finishing up and I asked her about a schedule, and it’s all online!
It’s such a minor thing but it annoys me so much. I want their class schedule stuck to my fridge with a magnet. I don’t want more time looking at this god-awful thing. Yoga is me trying to touch grass, get out of the house.
Maybe I’m some kind of bauhaus idealist, but I think paper in hand could play a nice role in turning that plate glass window full of yogis doing yoga into some walk-in traffic.
It annoys me because the world I grew up in, every business had some kind of paper handout with info. A yoga class schedule, assuming it’s stable, is the perfect thing to stick to my fridge and notice sometimes.
Being an old fogie sucks.
I’m not sure what the OP had in mind but with their description I was picturing the fast dining places, kinda like Panera bread. Sometimes in the more trendy places where they put like dandelions or some shit on sandwiches they will have a really convoluted bs system that requires as little human interaction as possible. But then they need all this extra staff because the system they made is confusing
Vancouver is littered with QR Only restaurants, which is extra fun when we take out our boomer tech-illiterate parents.
Yeah but Vancouver is famous for never admitting it’s wrong.
I’ve NEVER seen a QR restaraunt
The only thing worse is when they don’t explain that, and you’re stuck wondering why a waiter hasn’t come over. Yes I understand that the QR code is a menu. No I don’t think it’s more efficient to change the concept of a “restaurant” after 5,000 years.
Best thing is, last place that did this had a unique “fusion” menu. It’s not like the food was self-explanatory. So the waiters had to come to every table anyway, but it was hard to flag them down.
Btw restaurants with menu to choose from aren’t that old
Doubt. Even the Uruk Hai knew of menus
Yes they are. They were already ubiquitous in the Roman Empire. Pompeii has them in its ruins. It’s very recognizable as areas with seating and areas with food preparation / serving.
And the menus?
That’s what they thought, till a Romanian grandma used it to make wool gloves
The point of contention is the menu, not the sit down and eat part.
I feel like this is basically every action horror story ever as well…
“Forget everything you’ve seen in the movies, the only way to kill a Vampire is put a stake through the heart! Guns are useless!”
Ugh, that’s like D&D games where they’re like, your character has no idea about what a vampire is because folklore doesn’t exist in this universe so no one has ever shared a story ever… even though the party has a bard who sings about things people have heard
Right? We don’t need to spend 7 chapters of a 9 chapter story going “Why does this really old, really rich guy only come out at night and talk about not drinking wine!?!?!” When, the fucking cover of the story says “The Vampire Killer 3: The Vampire That Kills”
Where’s the “we want plates” lemmy community? I loved that one on the other site.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Well you see, we have mild AND spicy salsa.
Plot Twist: The spicy salsa is mid at best.
They used an onion to make it so hot.
Bienvenido a España!
And BOTH are chock full of cilantro
Here at Restaurant, we offer “lonely singles style” dining. You order something you want to eat, and then you don’t share it with anyone else. Unless they like, ask really politely for a bite, then that’s on you. At the end of your meal, you ask for the check, then you wait like 20 minutes while going back and forth on whether you really need dessert or not, then you pay and leave!
Also you either pay us or up front. It’s one or the other but we won’t tell you until you flag us down and ask.
Oh, y’all still have wait staff?
We have “digital kitchens” now: https://stories.whataburger.com/whataburger-debuts-new-digital-kitchen-all-the-flavor-with-more-convenience/
Same wait without the staff, tables . . . or blackjack
Placing your order ahead for pick up at the new Digital Pick-up Lane allows our teams in the restaurant, whom we call Family Members, to deliver fresh, made to order food while reducing your time in the drive thru.
jesus christ
I didn’t believe you for a moment there but yes guys it does say Family Members on the site and is incredibly cringe.
If that’s how they treat family, what do they do with strangers?
Take their money in exchange for what many consider “food,” typically.
or blackjack
What about the hookers? WHAT ABOUT THE HOOKERS?
@pizza used to have their own name for every ingredient and would correct you if you asked for something by its regular name
“I’ll have a cheeseburger and-”
“Oh, you must mean our Cheesy Squeezy Chuck Burger”
sharpens table knife
That is why I always bring my own table knife with a 15° full flat grind. Really cuts down on that pesky sharpening time that might let you cool off before the cops come.
True story: I ate at a restaurant inside of a casino and you can’t have a pocket knife when you enter for obvious reasons, they gave me a steak knife with a 5" fully serrated edge when I sat down.
Yeah? That’s what steak knives are…
Yes, but steak knives don’t look scary!
Neither do Swiss army knives. That said, I dress western. Pocket knife mysteriously finds its way behind my belt buckle at metal detectors and no one cares to look down my pants after they see the buckle.
They don’t make you take the belt off? That’s nice.
This obviously doesn’t work at airports. Concerts and such, no one really cares that much.
But if you say yes they say the same speal to remind you
I once went to a pizza place that had a slogan like “pizza done different” and you went through the a chipotle style line and picked out crust, sauce, toppings, then they made your pizza and gave it to you. I couldn’t figure out that was any different from a regular place.
Most pizza places dont have a Chipotle style line I guess
They fart on the dough.
If it’s chipotle style, then I would assume there’s more e. coli.
The only time I ever needed a waiter to explain how things worked was when I ate at a Paula Dean restaurant. That place did not work like a normal restaurant.
Fogo de Chao is unusual, too. The options are whether you want the salad bar or not, and what beverage. Otherwise, you have a thing that’s red on one side and green on the other. If you want the servers carrying different cuts of meat to stop by to offer you some to put on your plate, you flip that to red. If you’re good, you flip to green.
I thought it was red for stop and green for go meat
It is, they didn’t follow the instructions very well.
Unless they do have it right and it really is different to every other restaurant that’s like that.
How was it different? How did it work?
People don’t order individual meals. You order a meal for the whole table which is then brought out to the whole table to share. They provide unlimited refills of everything. So the whole table has to get together to decide what entree and sides they want. They don’t let you take any leftovers home either. Everyone gets butter rolls and a dessert.
If you go to their site you can see the menu but your choices are a 2, 3, or 4 entree meal with 4 sides.
Sounds like Maggiano’s except Maggiano’s is Italian food, and when I’ve been there they not only allow you to take home leftovers, the wait staff encourages you to ask for more when you’re done so you have some to take home.
They don’t let you take leftovers home? They gonna tackle me to the ground if I brought my own box?
Then they slide your silverware or straw over to you and say …and there’s that."
“Yes of course, that”
proceeds to bite into spoon
Stupid trendy restaurants with their gallium flatware.
“Our
foodcutlery will melt in your mouth!”
worst spoon ever