Restaurant Etiquette: Walking on broken glass
A Fat City reader wrote in to complain about the treatment he had recently received at a restaurant on the city’s south side. While eating, he had discovered a piece of glass in his food. That was disturbing enough, but the restaurant owner’s response was the final insult: “He told me, ‘If you get sick, call me and I’ll say I’m sorry.’ That was it. He just didn’t care.”
It was a repulsive response. But in over 20 years in the restaurant business, I’ve got to say that I saw the “glass in my food” scam pulled at least a half-dozen times, so I can sort of understand that some restaurant owners can get jaded. But glasses do break, and shards of glass can linger in a kitchen longer than you think. I’m still wiping up nearly microscopic splinters of glass from corners of my kitchen floor from a vase I dropped three years ago.
“I don’t care if the customer put the glass in the food or the kitchen accidently let something slip in,” a wise restaurant manager told me once. “You apologize profusely and comp the dinners. That’s it. You have to be conscientiousness.”
