Types of restaurant customers The day to day grind of the restaurant business doesn’t naturally lend itself to humor, notwithstanding the funny menus and signs that we sometimes see being circulated on social media. A restaurant is a place where tempers are waiting to soar, either in the form of an unhappy customer, a chef whose signature dish has been returned and asked to be redone, a manager who has to contend with a cleaner who has not turned up for duty, or an owner who is grinding his teeth over a nasty review posted by a pretentious food blogger.
However one needs to keep the spirits up as no amount of planning can mitigate a bad day if it has decided to show up at your door. Your avenues for injecting humor into the situation are limited as you are dealing with blue collar staff who have different notions about what is funny. The lowest common denominator that works here is what I personally don’t favour – having fun at the expense of peculiar customer habits, or lampooning your closest competitor – something which I have relished on extremely frustrating days.
Here are some of those peculiar customers :
1. Customers who scan the menu every day with the patience and silence required to analyse a legal document and then order the same dish, every day
2. Customers who stand at the billing counter and gossip endlessly on the phone and try to enquire about the menu through hand gestures or lip syncing. Sometimes I too reply in the same way. It is surprisingly effective.
3. Customers from another planet who have a different concept of time. For these customers 15 minutes means 5 minutes and no amount of convincing will do. Once I was forced to mark a circle around the timestamp in the receipt and make it clear that 15 minutes means 15 minutes.
4. Customers who feel they have lost a small battle if they have not received something extra with the food. I usually try to accommodate all preferences and include extras (if they don’t cost much). However I learnt the hard way that this would become the 'new normal' and they would then ask for something else extra. It’s the equivalent of wanting to have the last word in every argument.
5. The onion fetish – Some customers consume copious amounts of onions. To avoid wastage I generally provide what is considered an ‘average/reasonable’ amount. This leads to me being labelled stingy and being reminded of the latest (read ‘extremely low’) market price of onions. I wait for onions to reach Rs 100 a kilo so I can have a comeback answer one day, no matter how much it will hurt my input cost.
6. The clueless customer – These are generally extremely goody-goody customers who come in large groups and for whom food has as much importance in life as a bicycle has for a fish. Sometimes I use gimmicky names to promote ‘today’s special’ such as ‘Chandni chowk walay chhole kulchay’. These folks don’t get a single word out of the 5 in the name and have only one question - ‘Veg hai na?’. On hearing ‘yes’ they have only one thing to say - ‘we will have 8 of them’. I love such customers and want to hug them. They uncomplicate my life.
7. The guide – This customer leads a large hapless pack of expat colleagues and is on a mission to educate them about the menu. He spends about 15 minutes explaining to them the pros and cons of every item on the menu and how by placing their future in his hands they will be safe. I love outsourcing my work to such people.
8. The customer on a quest – Sometimes I get customers who are bored and want something ‘interesting’. Now unless I can invent a cauliflower that is capable of having an intelligent conversation on the dinner plate, my only option is to remind them of how they kept craving for curd rice when I did have ‘special’ things in my menu and had to axe them due to lack of enthusiasm. To such people I recommend Chilly Chicken without Chilly. They can keep contemplating if the chilly is actually missing or is it just their imagination.
9. The ‘brother-in-law’ customer (called ‘saala’ in Hindi) – This guy thinks he is part owner of the restaurant, bosses around with the staff, asks the waiter to serve things that he has not ordered at the counter and always wants to pay the ‘next time’. Such behaviour gets exaggerated when the brother-in-law is in a large group - ‘arey yeh apna hi restaurant hai. Order anything’. I have no issues with such brotherly feelings, as long as people pay up.
10. The skeptical customer - ‘Do you cook non veg in a separate vessel?’. Does your atta contain maida? (whatever the hell that means). Is the chicken fresh (no sir, we sourced it from an Egyptian tomb. It was the Pharoah’s favorite pet). Is the lamb a sheep or a goat (no ma’am, it is actually the sheep which was lamb at one point and neither is a goat). Does the cat outside belong to you?
Jokes aside, an overwhelming majority of customers are good customers. Since we don't know their names and still need to pass on correct instructions to the staff, we refer to them by their peculiar habits.
Cheers! |