Is this an appropriate question to a restaurant client after they paid? "Why was your tip low?" and demanded it to be more?! This was the Piatti Restaurant [150 Eglinton Ave. East.] experience we had last night. The restaurant is almost empty on what one would expect to be a busy Friday evening (the other restaurants on the same block - Philthy McNasty and the Irish Pub were packed!) so I understand why they would be concerned about tips but to ask for more tip is just rude and would just make one write about it on a blog (oh yeah, I'm doing that right now). In thinking about the dinner experience step by stey we (the group that I was with) realized that the service was a bit rushed. Were they running out of food? One of the guys in the group have gone to this restaurant before and requested for anchovies which they didn't have anymore. The salad selections are pretty standard - well there's mesclun and romaine choices, two sets of tomato salad, a basket of olives, two types of bread, two types of meat - a bit hardened prosciutto and salami, grilled eggplant, and some little things (cheese, greek salad, darkened avocado salad, etc) I wasn't too wow'd about.
The pasta choices was much better with either preselected items to your pasta, rigatoni or whatever other pasta of your choice or you can select the items yourself for a personalized pasta selection that is served to you in a slightly deep large white plate. One would expect at least ten choices in a rodizio format but tonight it was four types of pizza, roasted mini-chicken, lasagna, risotto, cannelloni and salmon. The dessert was either roasted pineapple dashed with cinnamon sugar and a dessert pizza covered in milk and white chocolate, mozzarella cheese, a slice of banana, two thin slices of strawberry and drizzled with a raspberry-cream cheese coulis.
I counted that on average at every 8 minutes, the waitstaff would come by to ask if we were done. This would have been fine if we actually were done but when clearly someone has pasta on a fork about to be eaten, the question seems inappropriate - especially when it was asked four times! What message is the waitstaff sending when plates are being cleaned up forcing the one person to hurry up when there were only 6 tables occupied (approx 10% occupancy) and they were still 3 hours away from closing? Definitely NOT WORLD CLASS and NEEDS to UPGRADE their attitude towards the few guests who are already there.
This experienced was punctuated with the rude comment of "why did you tip this way?" which was uncalled for, unprofessional, forcing us with undue guilt trip, and definitely creates unwilling participants out of us moving forward.
What would you do in such a situation?
