He Owns A Restaurant, And He Let A Nasty Customer Rack Up A Bill Of Over $4,000 To Teach Her A Lesson
If you’ve worked in a restaurant as a server or host, you’ve likely had to put up with customers who walk in with a sense of entitlement.
A customer always stops by once in a blue moon and thinks everyone in the restaurant works to serve them and them only.
It could be because they “know the owner,” are “well connected,” or are plain delusional, but regardless, entitled customers are all around difficult to deal with. It can be hard to resist cursing them out or spilling a drink on them.
One man shared a story about how he handled a rude customer at his restaurant that had the internet floored.
This man is a restaurant owner in Canada. His parents immigrated from Italy in the 70s and opened the restaurant. He started working there when he was 15 and is now the owner after his parents decided to retire.
Since he gained control of the restaurant, he’s made it quite the attraction after gaining great publicity. It’s a very popular restaurant that local celebrities, influencers, and news stations occasionally visit.
Unfortunately, with big, important guests come the guests who think they’re bigger and more important than everyone else.
One night during the holiday season, the restaurant’s busiest time of year, a group of six women in their 20s came in. One of them, whom RRinfo refers to as ‘Queen B Karen,’ looked a little older than the rest.
The Queen B told her friends about how cool the restaurant was, how delicious the food was, how celebrities sometimes go there, etc.
NDABCREATIVITY – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
Then, she went to him and asked for a table for six without a reservation. She said she wouldn’t need a reservation because she knows the owner and knows he keeps a few tables open each night for high-profile customers.
“Now, generally, this is true of many high-profile restaurants, and lately, I have been doing that as well,” he explained.
“But I had no clue who this woman was, and she definitely never spoke to me about any of this. I did get [that] she was trying to get in without a reservation, but she literally picked the worst person she could possibly talk to and try this.”
When he tried explaining that the woman and her friends couldn’t get a table without a reservation, she became pretty threatening, telling her friends she’d speak to the ‘owner’ and get him fired.
Then and there, he knew he needed to put this woman in her place but do so subtly.
He decided to seat her and her friends at one of those VIP tables and give them a round of free drinks, acting as if he had made a mistake.
“They ordered two more rounds by the time the appetizers arrived,” he recalled.
“At this point, they are all drunk, having done nothing but drink on an empty stomach most of the night and only having salads after. As more food arrives, more drinks are ordered. What these girls never realized was they are at our VIP table, which alone costs a few thousand just to sit in.”
Queen B Karen and her friends also ordered a lot of food from the special, high-end menu offered to VIP diners and a lot more fancy cocktails after the ones given to them for free.
For a moment, he considered stopping the women from ordering more, knowing they were racking up a bill that cost thousands of dollars. However, they reassured him that this was necessary, as their behavior worsened as the night progressed.
One of the women asked him if he felt “worthless” because all he “ever became was a waiter.” Later, one of his employees told him they overheard the women discussing how they could mess with him throughout the night.
So, when it was time to hand the Queen B the table’s bill, which cost over $4,000, he satisfyingly looked on as the entire table lost their minds. Queen B began crying and left to use the bathroom for a while.
When she came back, she had freshened up her face and showed him fake text messages with the restaurant’s “owner” to try and get him to cut the bill by half.
Eventually, he told her that if she didn’t pay the bill, he’d have to call the cops. The woman’s friends had to chip in and help pay, and he could tell it was an extremely embarrassing scenario.
“Two days later, a man walks into my restaurant fuming and asks one of my bartenders to speak to me,” he said.
“I was in the back office for a bit working, so he waited a good half hour for me. He was Queen B Karen’s father. She was with him too, keeping her head down.”
He showed Queen B Karen and her father security footage from the night she came in, proving that everything that happened that night was on her. When they were finished, Queen B Karen and her dad left, and she received quite a scolding.
At the end of the day, user RRinfo didn’t lose much profit after giving away three rounds of cocktails, but instead made more money than he intended to make that night and taught a very rude customer an important lesson.
Well, actually, I think there were a few lessons learned. Remember not to act like you’re ‘above’ anyone else, be kind to people who serve you, and don’t pretend to know the owner of a restaurant when you do not.
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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