September 25, 2023
An addition to my original comments about tipping, located here:
Tipping in Restaurants
Dinner out last night
Last night we went out to dinner in Port Townsend WA. It was a nice little cafe located off the main drag, small and cozy. I think it had nine tables.
The food was delicious, it looked and tasted like they used high quality ingredients, and was priced to reflect that (very expensive in my opinion). My plate of risotto was $30.00, and Laurie's plate of stroganoff was $28.00. I tried but did not quite succeed in keeping all of my grumbling about it to myself.
So how does this relate to tipping? The waitress was a little busy but with only nine tables to deal with not so much. Our two dishes together totalled $58.00, drinks, desert, and tax on top of that. The waitress probably assumed a 15% to 20% tip, which would be $8.70 to $11.60 for taking the order and delivering the two plates to the table, let alone the drinks and dessert. That by itself seems excessive to me, but when she arrived with the plates she had to ask which dish went to which of us. You know, "Who ordered the risotto?".
That's definitely one of my pet tipping peeves. There is only two of us, and if you can't remember which of us ordered which dish, then write it down and refresh your memory before serving the food. It is my opinion that if you can't take that little bit of extra effort, you don't deserve a good tip. Of course my wife doesn't feel the same and tipped a bit over 15%.
UPDATE May 12, 2024
One afternoon Laurie and I were eating lunch in the buffet on the Island Princess cruise ship. The ship staff serving drinks to the tables were roaming,
no one was assigned to any particular table, and they were quite busy. Laurie
ordered a Coke, I ordered a
Diet Coke. The server who took the order didn't deliver the drinks herself, she
turned delivery over to another server. Yet when the drinks arrived, she placed
the Coke in front of Laurie and the Diet Coke in front of me! Isn't it amazing
that in a situation where the servers were not receiving any tips that the
person who took our order payed attention to who ordered what, passed it along
to the second server, who then served the drinks without having to ask "Who had
the regular Coke?"
If they can do that under those circumstances, why can't others get it right?