Acustomer walks into a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and orders a bowl of milk and nothing else.
“I’m sorry ma’am, but we can’t serve your cat,” the waiter says.
“I don’t have a cat,” says the customer, and produces her own box of cereal and her newspaper, explaining that she doesn’t like the restaurant’s cereal selection.
That’s not the beginning of a joke. It’s one of many instances in which a customer fails to follow basic restaurant protocol.
Most customers don’t bring their own food to a restaurant. They don’t abuse the staff or demand that other customers change their behavior. They don’t get loudly drunk or fail to leave a decent tip.
But some do, and it would be a rare server indeed who did not have a story of difficult diners. They create constant challenges for industry workers, and their numbers do not seem to be diminishing.
Dealing with such customers “is your entry price into the business,” says New York-based restaurateur Peter Glazier, owner of the Strip House steakhouse chain and other restaurants.“ You have to assume that you’re in the service business.”
“If you hate difficult customers, you’re probably in the wrong business,” says restaurant consultant Clark Wolf, who recalls—when he waited tables in the 1970s—relishing the challenge of turning mean diners’ frowns upside down.
“If there were a class in the art of butt-kissing it would be an instant sellout,” says San Francisco-based restaurant and hospitality consultant Andrew Freeman, “because diners continue to expect a fabulous experience, and they have no qualms about telling you when you have missed the boat.”
Of course, servers have ways of getting back at their unruly charges. Wolf recalls seeing a New York businessman and his lawyers storm into an elegant fine-dining restaurant in Tribeca and announce loudly, “We want to be out of here in 45 minutes!”
“The waiter said ‘Absolutely, sir,’” Wolf recalls. “Afterwards I pulled the waiter aside and asked him how he dealt with that, and he said, ‘Twenty percent surcharge.’ Because if they have to be out in 45 minutes, they don’t have time to check the math on the bill.”
Drivers at a Denver pizza place in the 1980s were known to add “stupid tax” to customers they suspected would not be savvy enough to understand the importance of tipping.
But of course the point of foodservice is not cheating challenging diners, it is giving them the best service possible.
Difficult customers behave the way they do “to make themselves feel better, not necessarily to make you feel bad,” Wolf says, “and most people tend to respond if you treat them well.”
Bernard Martinage, head of the Federation of Dining Room Professionals, puts difficult customers in two categories: Those whose reasonable expectations are not met—such as when their steak is overcooked—and those whose expectations are unreasonable or “beyond what your establishment is set to provide.” Also in that second, smaller category are customers who are in a bad mood for reasons beyond the restaurant’s control, such as a difficult day at work or an argument with a spouse.
Either way, Martinage equates servers with doctors, in that the first rule should be: Do no harm.
“Back-of-the-house mistakes can be fixed before they reach the customer,” he says. “Once a front-of-the-house mistake is made, it’s made.”
So you have to be able to gauge a customer’s mood and the circumstances at a table, Martinage says. For example, if a party of five is having a business dinner, “you can’t go to the head of the table and say, ‘What is your problem?’”
Terry Coughlin, the general manager of Tabla, one of Union Square Hospitality Group’s New York restaurants, agrees that confronting a customer who’s clearly displeased with something can make matters worse.
“Sometimes people don’t want to fuss,” he says, in which case he might hand a business card to the dissatisfied customer to call if he or she wants to.
“Sometimes people just want to feel that they’re being listened to—that it’s not falling on deaf ears,” he says.
He says customers seem to expect that their complaints will be met with defensiveness, “or almost belligerent defiance, and what I want to do is thank them,” because a complaint that is voiced can usually be addressed.
For customers that are simply in a bad mood, many restaurateurs and consultants say that going on “nice overload” can frequently alleviate the situation.
But Coughlin says he can’t stand the term, “Kill them with kindness.”
“That’s sarcastic,” he says. “It’s almost mocking a person because it’s not sincere. There’s a way of treating someone with kindness instead of killing them with it.”
But every once in a great while, a customer crosses a line.
Kenny Lao is a veteran of Drew Nieporent’s Myriad Restaurant Group in New York, and now owner of the two-unit fast-casual chain Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, also in New York. His first moves when faced with difficult customers are to apologize, empathize and thank them for bringing the matter to his attention.
“Let them get what they want off their chest,” he says, “because a lot of times it’s not about the miso soup. It’s about their boyfriend fighting with them and the issues they’ve been having for the past three years, and it’s coming out in the miso soup.”
But one time he had to fire a customer.
“This woman would consistently come in,” he says. “She must have liked the place somehow, but every time she came in she was like: ‘I can’t believe this place. This is wrong, this is wrong, my soup’s not hot enough, my dumplings aren’t cooked properly, your staff is rude.’ But she kept coming in, regularly.
“Finally, one day I was downstairs [in the office] and saw on the camera that she was actually yelling at kids that were another customer’s children, who were running around being kids…and she was clearly giving my staff a really hard time, too.”
Lao went upstairs to see how he could help her, and she complained about the kids and said his staff was rude.
“I said, ‘I’m really, really sorry that this is happening. A lot of times you can’t really control children. We try to do the best we can, and I’d appreciate your not yelling at the children. Talk to the parents directly or talk to the management.”
He apologized that she thought the staff was rude, but “she kept ranting and raving until finally I used a line that I’d only heard Drew use twice the whole time I worked with him: ‘Not every restaurant’s for every customer, nor is every customer for every restaurant.’” He told her: “‘If you’re really, really unhappy coming here, I don’t want you to be really, really unhappy with life in general, and you make my staff really stressed out when you come in. It’s just not a good fit, lady.’
“It kind of sucked to have to do.… It was a really tough call, but it made for a much better environment where [the staff wasn’t] hating it when she came in or afraid she’d come in that day.”
But most of the time, the simple act of listening to customers’ complaints and treating them with respect will turn a potentially explosive situation into a great experience for everyone.
“Introduce yourself first and foremost,” advises Linda Addy, general manager of Salty’s on the Columbia in Portland, Ore. “Break down any barriers that may exist by creating a human-to-human interaction.… It might be that Mr. Smith had a flat tire on the way in and was yelled at by [his] boss, making his overdone steak more dramatic than it normally would be.”
As for that woman in Washington who ordered the bowl of milk for her cereal, her server, Scott Lerner, charged her for a glass of milk, which at the time was $1.50.
“She also had a [$1] cup of coffee,” he recalls. “After she leaves—with full belly and a nice tip—the table next to her asks me how I managed to wait on her with a straight face. I told them that the week prior, the same woman came in, gave me an egg and asked me to scramble it for her.”
She hadn’t actually done that, but it made for a great story for the other customers—who also left him a great tip.