Springfield blogger Amy McMasters is, among other things, web mistress of The Snarling Marmot blog. She sometimes refers to herself in the third person. Marmot on Mondays, her soon-to-be-famous weekly take on the lighter side of life in 417-land, is special to the 417 Blog. If you like what you read, please visit her website.

It pains me to have to do this, but I am the Snarling Marmot and I do have to snarl now and again. Today, I’m going to snarl about how both restaurant patrons and restaurant owners are supposed to behave. I seriously shouldn’t have to do this, but here goes.

I’ve been in at least three different dining establishments over the last few weeks and had my food arrive at an alarmingly different time than that of my dining companion. This is not acceptable. It forces the patron without food to be annoyed, and the patron with food to feel awkward. If he or she begins to eat it's rude. If they don’t, his or her piping-hot meal may be lukewarm before the other dish arrives.

It's just good customer service NOT to put your patrons in such a position. Capice?

Furthermore, and this is a more personal peeve, under no circumstances should you use the coffee machine to brew iced tea, especially if you are also using it to brew coffee. Ick! I love coffee. But it is a highly aromatic and powerfully flavored beverage. It doesn’t matter how much cleaning you do, if you use the same machinery to brew both tea and coffee you wind up with coffee-flavored tea. And it sucks. Trust me.

Now lets talk about patrons and poor behavior, shall we? Cell phones are a part of our lives, whether we like it or not. They are necessary and ever-present. But that doesn’t mean you get carte blanche to behave like an imbecile with them.

In ALL public places, not just restaurants, your cell should be on vibrate or silent. Ring tones are fun, but the rest of the world does not necessarily have the same love for J-Lo that you do. Furthermore, J-Lo’s fifteenth serenade of “Let’s Get Loud” while your boss, husband and five kids have been calling you incessantly for fifteen minutes makes me want to get loud—with you.

Speaking of loud, if such an emergency should occur that you need to answer your phone while dining, please keep your conversation to a level that the people on the street can’t hear you. Not long ago, my lunch conversation was disturbed by a rather self-important woman in the booth behind me. Self-important had not one, not two, but three high-volume phone calls, where she chided everyone from her son to her Realtor about not calling her. Honey, my guess is they aren’t calling because they value their hearing.

As a corollary to this rule, no loud conversation is polite in a restaurant. Giving the intimate details of your outpatient surgical procedure you just left at the top of your lungs—all while monopolizing the sole waiter in the establishment—is not only rude, but embarrassing, mot just to you but everyone being forced to share this experience. Common sense would indicate that if you’re still suffering the after-effects of anesthesia, you probably should be home, not at a restaurant slurping pasta and shouting about pain meds.

With rising food costs, dining out is becoming a special event and not so much a routine occurrence. We owe it to one another as patrons and business owners to keep that event a happy one. Bon appetite!

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Posted on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 | Permalink