Can I send a dish back just because I didn’t like it? How do we split the check without causing a fight in the group chat? In Code of Conduct, our restaurant etiquette column, we explore the do’s and don’ts and IDKs of being a good diner.
On any given night at your local watering hole or restaurant, bartenders are doing double time, dispensing drinks and life lessons from behind the bar. If you’re rusty on etiquette or self-conscious about how to act on a night out, John deBary is here to help. A drinks writer and hospitality pro in New York City, he taps his vast industry experience to navigate some everyday conundrums about which you may have been too afraid to ask.
Do I have to wait for everyone else’s food to arrive before cutting into my own plate?
Yes? I think it’s a little weird to just start chowing down and make your friends sit through a nonconsensual mukbang. Most places do their best to make sure everything hits the table at more or less the same time. You can probably stand to wait the 40 seconds it takes for everyone to be served.
Do you tip on the total price of the bill if you order a bottle of wine?
Yes. Next question.
Just kidding. There is a lot more nuance here. Tipping is a not-great-to-kind-of-bad system for compensating restaurant staff, but at its core it is structurally very similar to other commission-based models. A salesperson’s commission percentage does not decrease as the price of the sold item increases, so you should think about tipping with the same framework. Often the beverage staff invests a significant amount of unseen labor in developing the expertise needed to sell pricey wine, and the bill reflects more than simply the cost of goods.
If I don’t like a table, is it okay to ask for a different location?
Yes. In my nearly two decades of experience working in hospitality, I’ve never observed a conspiracy to give people the worst tables possible just for fun. Usually the decision on where to seat a given party is based on matching the number of people to the number of seats while giving the restaurant the most flexibility to accommodate walk-ins and other last-minute changes to their books.
A restaurant should be happy to oblige a request for a different table if possible, but take any denial with grace. Just because that table over there is empty right now does not mean that they’re just holding it open to satisfy their need for sadistic thrills.
If there’s a social media influencer disrupting the meal with lights, cameras, and ruckus, who should speak up, the staff or the diner?
Yeah, this is really annoying. If this is something the restaurant has arranged in advance, they should have at least set some parameters as to how intrusive the person can be. It is on the restaurant to schedule this outside the boundaries of normal service, or at least at the very beginning or end of dinner hours. If it’s a spur-of-the-moment thing, the responsibility falls on the restaurant staff to curtail the photo shoot, regardless of the possible ramifications. People might be scared to piss off an influencer because they see a high follower count, but even if this person is genuinely huge on TikTok, it’s worth the risk.
Ultimately the best PR for restaurants is word of mouth from the normal-ass people, i.e., most customers. That should be at the forefront of running service. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that the people just wanting to have a meal in peace can do so.
A friend invited me to a four-person dinner weeks ago. Forty-eight hours before, they have not texted back about solid plans or a reservation. Whose responsibility is it to keep the plans?
Top-line answer is that the person who initiates the plans is responsible. Thanks to my German and Austrian ancestry, combined with a cacophony of mental health diagnoses, I’m the kind of person who will send you a calendar appointment for a dinner date 21 days in advance. I realize that this is not standard human behavior so I don’t hold this expectation for the general populace. (Fun fact, I once made dinner plans with someone and sent them a calendar appointment with the time and location. They only realized I wasn’t kidding when I texted them to say I’d arrived.)
How to proceed depends on determining how important is it for you to have these details more than 48 hours in advance. If you need to plan for childcare or someone else has invited you to dinner, it is perfectly fine to check in and ask for more certainty. If not, I’d just hold the evening until you hear otherwise.
I’d recommend performing something of an emotional cost-benefit analysis to determine how you really feel about this person. If this happens a lot and you’re willing to put up with it, accept it. If it’s just not worth it for you, I don’t think you need to send them a tedious friend-breakup text, but it’s perfectly okay to have a direct conversation about these factors.
Classic Friends scenario: How do you split the bill when one person barely eats?
As a nondrinker, I sympathize with the friend who barely eats yet contributes a relatively greater proportion to the bill than others. In general I usually offer to split it evenly with everyone since we all basically have had the same experience. I know this is a privileged take, however.
Whatever the financial circumstances, it should not be incumbent on the person to ask their friends to prorate their portion of the bill. I think the most graceful thing to do is for the rest of the group to cover that person’s portion of the tip as an easy and clean solution. Or you can enlist the help of your server because it’s fairly easy with today’s point of sales systems to split a bill.