There are generally two sides to the bad dining experience coin: bad food, and bad service. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky (and we frequently are,) that coin manages to spin on edge and you get both. The question then becomes, “What to do?” 

Bad Food
You order a steak well done, and it comes out bloody. You ask for no tomatoes, and there they are, big red blobs ruining the beautiful green of your salad. That “steaming hot” cup of soup you were looking forward to is ice cold. There’s an infinite list of possible “bad food” situations when it comes to dining out. Generally speaking, food issues are not your server’s fault. The kitchen gets busy, items cook too long, or too little. Once you’ve brought the issue to your server’s attention, the hope is that fresh tasty food will be brought back to you ASAP.

Bad Service
This one’s a little harder to categorize. Drinks go un-refilled, servers are MIA, and less-than-desirable attitudes abound. Do you simply reduce the server’s tip? Call a manager?  Or grin and bear it in hopes that nothing worse happens to your meal? (If you’ve watched Waiting you understand. If you haven’t, I’m not sure you’ll want to dine out ever again.)

The internet has several solutions to these dining woes. Some suggest that you should expect to have bad food comp’d from your bill. Others would imply that a sort of “dine and dash” may be in order (i.e., simply leaving the restaurant.) Of course, you can always ask to speak to a manager, in either bad dining situation. 

One thing I’ve found seems to work fairly well for us is a written complaint. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I’ve managed some very positive responses after filing a complaint, not just with sit-down restaurants, but fast food as well. In many cases, we’ve been given gift certificates to compensate for the bad experiences. Most restaurants have promised to forward the information to the specific location’s manger and staff. Only one such time did my complaint letter seem to fall on deaf ears.

Long story short, we visited a popular local sports-themed restaurant one Friday evening, after the “happy hour” rush. We ordered, and drinks arrive fairly promptly. I noticed mine was not made as described on the menu. When the food runner arrived with only one plate, he stopped it off with J, and left without any mention of my dinner. After coming back to confirm that I had, in fact, also ordered, he told me that my meal would be another five minutes. Our waitress later explained that my food had been burnt, and they were making a new Stromboli for me. The manager breezed by, explaining new food was coming, and to let him know if we needed anything to let him know, although I couldn't catch his name, nor was he wearing a nametag. Once my non-burnt food arrived, our waitress treated us very poorly, as though this whole thing were our fault.  At no point did she check if my food was ok or if we wanted anything else to drink. It was as if they completely wrote us off as customers. I ended up sending an email to the corporate office, where we got a response and a promise that a gift certificate would immediately be dropped in the mail. When it took over two weeks to arrive (from Harrisburg…), it truly felt that our happiness was at the bottom of their priority list.

So I ask you, readers, what do you do?