Yesterday I was hanging out in the kitchen of William and Shannon Mueller at Babblin' Babs Bistro. They're helping me cook up some recipes for our 11/19 Thanksgiving food section (in the interest of job preservation, I feel compelled to tell you to buy extra copies of the paper that day).

As we were mulling over turkey breast stuffed with asparagus and salmon (and, no, I am not making that up.. fish inside a turkey....yes, indeed.. turfishen? What do we call it?), Shannon started telling me about some pretty spectacularly bad customers.

There was the person who cat called her with a rude whistle to the dining room. A solo diner the Muellers have dubbed "the amazon" spread her things out over two tables. Two tables. One person. At a small joint like Babblin' Babs.

A question for chefs, owners and front of house people: What do you do when a customer is just so completely rude, you can barely stand to have them in your dining room?

Do you grin and accept it? Is the customer always right? (Please say no!). Do you tell them to stick it? How much honesty do you feel compelled to use when telling a diner they're being inconsiderate?

Your thoughts, please.

Readers of this blog, at times, have blasted South Sound restaurants for truly terrible service. We've all been there, done that, and have been bitter about it (the lack of an apology for a used bandaid in my food at a Bonney Lake Chinese restaurant comes to mind...)

Today, I flip to the better side of service, the gracious kind.

A reader sent us a letter about a dining experience in Orting that ended with a great moment of honesty. Here:

This afternoon my wife and I were bicycling on the Foothills Trail from South Prairie to Orting. We stopped at the Shell Station in Orting which is home to CC’s Grill. They have a comfortable spot in the Shell station with a great assortment of books, magazines and newspapers for kids and adults. After splitting the best burger and fries that we had eaten in years I left a couple of dollars in the tip jar to show our appreciation.

We gathered our cycling clothes and walked our tandem bicycle back out to the trail. Just as we were getting back on the bicycle, a young lady came running up to us. She said she had noticed that one of the bills I had left in the tip jars was a $20. She was worried that this was unintentional.

It had been a mistake. But we were very surprised. How often does one encounter this level of honesty and concern in today’s society, especially among young people? I understood then why the food we had just eaten was so delicious. It was made by people who really do care about others and the job that they are doing.

We encourage everyone to visit Orting, a place where small town values are still alive and well. While you are there stop at the Shell station and check out CC’s Grill. They have a big menu and the burger and fries we split today were absolutely the best.

Sincerely,
Steven & Alice Miller, Tacoma

So, readers, anyone done anything similar for you? Comment and tell us who it was and what they did.

What happens when a restaurant abruptly goes out of business but still has pending business with some customers?

"Stadium Bistro," one patron wrote in an e-mail to the News Tribune, "closed its doors Saturday night without notice and has failed to notify the several parties that have booked its banquet room -- many of whom have left a deposit."

The e-mailer said she was dining at another downtown Tacoma restaurant when she heard the news Saturday night. She said she "was in total shock since I have a wedding reception planned there on May 17, 2008."

A co-worker approached me on Monday with a similar concern. Her mother gave her an $80 gift certificate to Stadium Bistro. She figures she'll have to eat the gift certificate.

My co-worker had good idea: Other restaurants in town should honor a defunct restaurant's outstanding gift certificates. Not at full value, but at, say, 50 percent of the value. It would be, she said, good marketing and customer outreach.

I'm told that Stadium Bistro's owners are trying to re-book the May 17 wedding reception at another Tacoma restaurant.

Do you have gift certificates you can't redeem because the restaurant(s) went out of business?

Now there are seven kinds of Coke
500 kinds of cigarettes
This freedom of choice in the USA drives everybody crazy
-- from "See How We Are" by X

My dinnermate dove into the mosh pit of side-dish indecision at McGrath's Fish House in Federal Way last week.

The wild roasted salmon stuffed with asparagus came with a choice of side dishes: red potatoes, pasta, rice, fries, tomato slices or cottage cheese. It also came with green salad or cole slaw, and an unspecified vegetable that turned out to be Chinese broccoli.

But, wait, there's more:

For an additional 59 cents, my dinnermate could upgrade her regular dinner salad to the one with pears and blue cheese or to the petite shrimp Louie -- or she could have a cup of chowder or seafood stew.

It didn't help that the server ran through the sides, salads and soup upgrades faster than a punk rocker on a power-chord drive.

Of course, my dinnermate said, "Huh?" and the server recited the whole thing again while I wondered why the restaurant was upselling a so-so salad instead of just raising the entree price by 59 cents. The whole she-bang, without the sales pitch.

I welcome Oregon-based restaurants like McGrath's and Original Roadhouse Grill into the South Sound market. They're casual, affordable, family friendly vein of concept restaurants. They're different from each other (McGrath's: "Pacific Northwest fresh" seafood, burgers and steaks; Original Road House Grill: burgers, steaks, peanuts on the floor) but similar in that they both give customers a number of side-dish choices.

I'll admit I enjoy ordering Whoppers without pickles and lettuce (as Burger King used to say, "special orders don't upset us"), but I've been chewing on choices since I enjoyed half of my dinnermate's salmon at McGrath's last week (she enjoyed the rest, although we both thought the early-season asparagus was stalky and stringy). It's left me with a simmering question:

Is choice empowering or burdensome?

I dared my dinnermate to tell the waiter she'd give him 59 cents if he told the cook to make the decision about her side dishes for her. She ignored me. How do you feel?

A Lakewood waitress suspected of stealing customers credit information has been arrested.

Here's what Sgt. Mike Zaro of the Lakewood Police told King 5 TV:

"Somewhere between taking the credit card, running it to pay for the meal and returning the credit card, she would slide the card through what is called a skimmer. It's a little electronic device that can be palmed easily and hidden easily, and what that device would do would copy all the information that's on the magnetic strip on the back of the credit cards. Something like this takes seconds to swipe a card through a skimmer and steal all of your information."

The waitress allegedly passed stolen card numbers on to three men who made false credit cards, which they used to make purchases at Wal-Marts in Lakewood and Spanaway.

Eight victims have been identified and police are still looking for three other suspects involved in the skim scam at the Applebee's in Lakewood. The thefts apparently took place in December and January.

A credit card skimmer, left; a Bic lighter, right.

I hadn't planned on doing so, but I'm glad I was told I didn't have to, because I now feel it's officially on the record:

"You don't have to tip. It's just take-out."

That's what the guy at a pizza place in Kent told me Sunday when I signed the credit card receipt for my take-out pie.

Good to know.

As for the brewpub bartender who accommodated my special request and got me out the door in time to pick up my pie while it was still hot from the oven, she got a $3 tip on a $2.99 tab.

To the manager of the Federal Way fish restaurant where a customer allegedly got frisky with a waitress Sunday night (Sitting in the adjacent booth, I saw an awkward hug and later heard "sexual harassment" and "touched a button" in the follow-up discussion):

Dude, you are one cool cucumber. I would have had the dishwashers knee-cap the (alleged) creep. Customer-service kudos to you, Joe, for the diplomacy (and restraint) you demonstrated.

Now, let's talk about that rock that landed in my steamer clams. Not a pebble, but a rock bigger than the clams themselves.

Whom do you tip for a rock? Charlie Brown?

Good food, but good grief.

A Seattle restaurateur who claims to have 30-plus years experience in the business is offering her consulting services to train restaurants and their servers in doing their jobs -- serving customers.

"The number one reason customers don't return to a restaurant is poor service," Dorothy Frisch wrote on her Polished Service letterhead. "Most customers will not complain directly to the management, making damage control difficult. Likely they will not come back and could tell thousands of Internet readers to not go as well."

Well, dear Internet readers, do you know why, in Frisch's estimation, bad service abounds? She says:

I see the need for Frisch's services all over town. Why, recently, a waitress at a Sixth Avenue hot spot rushed up to my lunch table and all but told my companion and myself that we were ready to order.

"No," I told her, "we're not. Come back when we've read the menu."

By the time she came back to take our order, I'm guessing, she'd been informed that two of her customers were News Tribune employees. (The owner had already stopped by my table for a semi-discrete chat.) The waitress was so nice to us from then on out that I thought she was going to fetch my pipe and slippers.

I tipped low that day, because the waitress set the bar low to begin with. I'd rather have my face licked by a dog than my tail smooched by a server.

An urge for oysters this weekend deposited me at the bars of Pacific and Sea grills in downtown Tacoma.

Both restaurants served oysters on the half shells, atop beds of ice, with cocktail and mignonette sauces.

Sea Grill oysters had grit and grip. The shucker made a mess of the mantle, leaving shards of broken shell. The shucker also forgot to slip the knife beneath the meat. Those Quilcenes and Chef Creeks clung.

At Pacific Grill, Kumamotos and all their bivalve brothers slid effortlessly -- and gritlessly -- from their shells.

And that -- as I told my slurping companion -- is why we paid $25 for 12 oysters, instead of staying home and shucking our own.

(Paying $12 for six gritty, clingy oysters? Research. Speaking of research, do you know how to shuck oysters? Can you clean a crab? Share your comments. I may net a story.)

Oh, one last thing: I loved that spicy white Gru-Vee that Pacific Grill's server recommended when my slurping companion inquired about white wines by the glass.

It was my first taste of the Austrian Gruner Veltliner grape. It started kind of dry and sweetened up on my tongue. It was perfect with oysters.

But I wish my server had added one more thing to her recommendation:

"And that's $11 per glass."

Good thing my slurping companion slurped the Gru-Vee down. I'd have done a spit-take when the tab came.

Next time I'll remember that asking the price of something isn't gauche; it's just plain common sense.

Same goes for telling customers the prices of things.

The other day I blogged about a miserable service experience at a Tacoma restaurant. So bad, in fact, that the restaurant would have done better for its customers by outsourcing the servers' jobs to India.

Now, a reader who claims to be a server -- and, more importantly, claims to have some dish on customers' bad behavior -- has a request:

How about a post on the polar opposite? I would like to hear from professional wait staff that read this blog. Tell us your experiences of inept customers and the ridiculous things they ask. I'm sure you have a few…I know I do!

I'd like to hear them too. It's Friday. This here forum is yours' through the weekend.

But before you share your tales of customers gone wrong, I have one more anecdote from that Tacoma restaurant whose service staff needs better training and a lot more attention from the owners.

=> Read more!

Sometimes I joke –- but it's not really a joke –- that my dream restaurant is a fancy sit-down place with cafeteria-style self service.

Not that I have anything against waiters or waitresses. I only have issues with servers like the ones I encountered at a Tacoma restaurant recently.

I also have problems with restaurant owners who don't properly train their staff and manage to sit within earshot and do nothing while an episode like this transpired:

Even though I clearly and correctly pronounced the ethnic entree I wanted, the waitress didn't understand. English appeared to be her primary language, as well as mine. So I understood exactly what was going on when she asked me to point to the entree on the menu.

A few minutes later, another waitress brought a bowl of sliced onions, peppers and lemons to the table.

"Are these yours," she asked.

She looked like the deer caught in the headlights. I looked at her like the critic caught in the headlights.

"I don't know," I said. "What are they?"

She said: "I don't know. The cook just told me to bring them out to this table. That's all he said."

My dinner companion and I pondered the possible condiments as we waited for our entree.

Our entree arrived, carried by the first waitress, the one who needed the dish pointed out to her on the menu.

"I'd like to know what that stuff's for too," she said. "The cook doesn't tell us very much about stuff."

Figuring I should try this stuff with my dinner, I squirted lemon over the lamb and rice and nibbled on slivers of red onions and jalapenos between bites.

It wasn't bad. But it also wasn't up to me as the diner to figure out.

One night this month, I arrived at a restaurant in Milton at 8:55 p.m. I was told the restaurant closed at 8:45, but I was welcomed anyway.

(Note: I don't think I got special favor. My steak tasted sour, and I woke up sick. Other diners came in after me.)

This weekend, I sat down at a Tacoma hot dog bar at 8:55 p.m. The business hours posted on the door said the place stays open until 11 p.m. However, the "kitchen" -- steam tables and bun warmers, really -- closed at 9. I only had time for one round of dogs.

Restaurants commonly tell customers "We're open until ..." "but we stop serving at..."

I understand labor costs. I understand the need for staff to lock the door and rush off to last call themselves.

But please don't close up on customers' time. If the sign on your door says you're open until 11, please accept our business until then.

I wanted to attend Zoobilee, the food-filled fund-raiser, but I'm currently between waist sizes and my formal duds don't fit.

So I stayed home, which, I insist, is what the management of a new Tacoma restaurant and lounge with fine-dining ambitions should have told its hostess to do when she showed up for work wearing the dress that revealed more than I, as a diner, could stomach seeing.

Hosts and hostesses are the faces of restaurants and lounges. They greet customers. They seat customers. They set the tone. We might come for the chef, but we're met by someone else -- the host or hostess.

The tone set by this hostesses' dress -- disclosure: I'm not a fashion guy, so I'll describe the dress as a mini print toga with a V-neck that plunged to her sternum -- turned my date and I into a couple of butch and catty schoolgirls. It was like "Mean Girls," but with a decent pinot grigio.

Actually, it was like this:

"Oh. My. God. I didn't know panty lines could stretch that far."

And this:

"Is that my veal burger under there? Or is her dress way too tight?"

Back when I washed dishes at my parents' restaurant, I tried dressing new-wave for work one night. I put on one red Converse sneaker and one orange Converse sneaker. My parents wouldn't even let me in the car. They ordered me to stay home instead.

The hostess at the new Tacoma restaurant and lounge sat near the front door, on which a sign announced that proper attire is required. I'm sure that's code for something like "no shoes, no shirt, no hoodies, no cammo, no beaters no service." It should also be a mandate to the staff.