Acting like a snobby jerk will get you kicked out of tony restaurants

A friend of mine, married to a well-known local restaurateur, called me a couple of weeks ago to share some restaurant gossip. Two friends of hers, wealthy and connected, had been “kicked out” of Bluestem (900 Westport Road) one night by the owner, Colby Garrelts. This couple, it seems, had sat at the bar and ordered an appetizer and a bottle of wine. They were going to share a dinner. That’s all well and good, except the dinner came out of the kitchen before the appetizer. The couple sent the dinner back to the kitchen and sipped wine until the appetizer was served. After finishing the starter, the bartender brought out a new entrée, but the diners weren’t ready for it yet. They wanted to enjoy their wine, so they sent the dinner back a second time.

That’s when the normally even-tempered Garrelts lost his cool.

“We were swamped in the kitchen that night,” Garrelts tells me. “And, yes, the appetizer order came in just as the kitchen got slammed. We were knee-deep in orders. So the starter came out much later than it should have. That part was definitely our fault, and we admitted that.

“But these customers were extremely difficult,” Garrelts continues. “My staff bent over backward to make them happy. We offered to pay for everything. But there was a lot of complaining, and they demanded I come out of the kitchen to speak to them. And I did. I asked them to leave. It was obvious that we couldn’t make them happy, so they needed to go. My wife was mortified, and I had at least one sleepless night over it. But I refused to be yelled at in my own restaurant. It’s like someone yelling at you in your home.”

Michael Smith, chef and owner of the restaurant of the same name at 1900 Main, had an even more awful couple. “They were in town for a convention and were supposedly wine experts,” Smith recalls. “They sat at our bar and started talking loudly about our wine list. They called it garbage. They were rude to their server — one of our best, by the way — and were very hostile. I came out and tried to calm them down, and one of them said, ‘Please leave our table.’ I reminded them that it was my table, and I was inviting them to leave. Now.”

Rude diners, consider yourselves warned.

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