Cranky Customers

At the recent soft opening of Pesce [3029 Kirby, (713)522-4858], a diner leaving the restaurant declared to a staffer standing by the door, “The food here sucks. I’m never coming back.” The interesting thing in this little anecdote is not the actual suckiness or nonsuckiness of the cuisine (people who know fine food from a professional point of view found the cuisine very good, indeed). That is a subjective experience. The fine point here is that the restaurant was offering everything on the menu — and everything in the bar — for free to the rehearsal audience.

Welcome to what is sometimes known as the hospitality business.

A private person chooses to whom he wishes to extend his hospitality. A restaurant is a public place and is open to whoever has the price of a meal. (Sometimes they are open to someone who does not have the price of a meal, but that is covered in law under the quaint term of “defrauding an innkeeper.”) This leaves the innkeeper open to interactions with persons who have, as the pop psychologists like to term it, issues.

A recent New York Times article put forth the thesis that London is the world capital of rude customer behavior in up-market restaurants. A number of examples were given, with corresponding descriptions of the restaurateurs’ responses. Alcohol seemed to feature prominently in most of the cited cases. In particular, the story recounted the behavior of upper-class twits who were demanding to be, in the language of the New Prohibition movement, overserved. The demands were loud and horrendously rude. The innkeepers often responded in a manner that illustrates the wonderful, courtly refinements of sadism that are so exquisitely and uniquely British. A silent waiter first would remove the dishes, glassware and flatware. If that didn’t send a message, the waiter would return to remove the tablecloth. If that failed to produce a call for the check, the staff would remove the entire table.

“People feel pretty silly sitting around in a circle with no table between them,” one of the restaurateurs quoted by the Times observed. In Houston, this does not seem to occur. Perhaps the old Texan custom, when confronted by provoking behavior, to respond by opening a can of whoop-ass encourages drunken customers to stay in line. When Governor Bush signed that bill into law allowing Texans to carry concealed weapons, he may have meant to strike a blow for civility.

The other major misbehavior cited by the article was couples going into a bathroom for the purpose of having sexual relations. Sex in bathrooms is usually more of a guy thing. Women prefer bedrooms and flower-strewn meadows free of fire ants, chiggers, deer ticks, scorpions, leeches and mosquitoes. Since there are no flower-strewn meadows free of such vermin anywhere in Texas, bedrooms remain the principal venue of choice. And –according to Houston restaurant business veterans — on occasion, bathrooms. One Houston story going the rounds involved two people who were married, but not to each other. At a wine-tasting dinner at one of Houston’s most venerable fine dining establishments, inflamed no doubt by the spirit of that ancient god who came out of Asia to bring a suffering humanity ecstasy, they retired to one of the (very nice) bathrooms. What makes the story unusual is that a pregnancy reportedly resulted from that tryst, with complications of the classic light opera variety ensuing.

Bad bathroom behavior, especially in the Reagan era, when cocaine was the chic drug of choice among an astonishing number of educated, professional people, more often involves drugs. In that era, Clint Eastwood, in town for a celebrity golf tournament, went into the men’s bathroom at one of Houston’s tippy-top, very tony restaurants to find two men and a woman inhaling a bit of rhino-rinse in a stall. Dirty Harry didn’t pull out a .44 Magnum and drill the miscreants, but instead turned his back. He did smirk a bit while adjusting his tie in the mirror. No harm, no foul that time.

The problem, for a Texas restaurateur, with recreational drug users is that failure to discourage such behavior by customers can, in theory, result in the loss of the establishment’s liquor license, which would be the kiss of death for any serious restaurant.

The most common form of bad behavior cited by Houston restaurateurs involves customers who believe it is a sign of discernment to send a dish back to the kitchen.

“I have one customer,” a chef-owner in the Galleria area reports, “who has been coming in about once a week for two or three years. He always sends his dish back to the kitchen.”

There are reasons to send a plate back, certainly, such as food that has grown cool while waiting to be brought to the table, or steaks not cooked to the specified degree of doneness. Nuisance customers are those who want a dish prepared a specific way other than what is described on the menu but who do not specify their desires to the waiter at the time they place the order. A multiple-round bout of this game can send a chef roaring out of the kitchen for a somewhat intense discussion of the dish in question. Not the best way to impress a date.