Restaurant workers call out ‘rude’ customer behavior with surprising list of pet peeves: ‘We are people, too’

Restaurant pros are spilling the tea — on their rudest customers.

Surprisingly, how patrons treat waitstaff doesn’t top the list of bad behaviors — but rather, how guests behave towards the eatery’s host.

“I don’t expect people to have an in-depth knowledge of how a restaurant operates — and the host, the maître d’, is kind of like the conductor of a big symphony, and people aren’t privy to that,” Patrick Murphy, the director of hospitality and partner at Colorado restaurants Rootstalk and Radicato, told HuffPost.

Patrons often make the mistake of thinking the host as “the low man on the totem pole,” when really, they are orchestrate where people are seated and when, all while juggling “a lot of vectors of information.”

Being rude to the host, then, is a cardinal sin in the restaurant biz.

It can be as simple a just greeting the host when you walk through the door, instead of just jumping in with: “We have a reservation.”

“They just kind of breezed by the most basic human interaction, which is a simple hello, a smile, a greeting, an acknowledgement that you are a person and you’re doing a job and that you value that first interaction at a restaurant,” Murphy explained.

“I think that one is probably the one that is most persistent.”

The second worst behavior is asking if you can sit at a visibly empty table.

“You come in and it’s a fairly empty restaurant — it’s early in the night, let’s say, and I have to tell you, ‘Oh, no, we don’t we don’t have a lot of space right now,’ and someone’s looking around the room and like, ‘Well, what about this table?’” Murphy described.

Those empty tables are likely saved for reservations that are due to arrive in half an hour — in short: you can’t sit there.

“That is a little rude and kind of lacks some understanding that while the restaurant may appear empty at the moment, in a half an hour or an hour, it will be full,” he continued. “And we have to save those tables for people who have reservations with us.”

If patrons say, in response, that they won’t take very long to eat their meal, that is equally as frustrating, said Hannah Brown, a hostess in New Jersey.

Brown also complained about those who do not immediately respond to notifications that their table is ready when put on the wait list. If they take too long to reply, their table is ultimately given away to the next party, which can create quite the pickle, should they decide to show up.

So, “not having any urgency to respond when we’re trying to communicate with them,” Brown told HuffPost, is frustrating.

Then, there’s the issue of reservation party size.

Arriving to the restaurant “with more people in your party than you’ve reserved for” is something “that happens pretty often,” Brown continued.

“And then we kind of have to scramble to accommodate,” she said.

Murphy recommends calling ahead to the establishment to let them know there will be more people joining, “because walking into the front door and being like, ‘Oh we’re five instead of four,’ changes the entire landscape of what kind of table we can offer you,” he said.

Similarly, allowing more people to join your table mid-way through the meal is also an annoyance for staff.

“When people have other friends or family join them halfway through the meal and add to a table that doesn’t accommodate that many people … it affects diners around them,” Brown explained.

Adding chairs can be cumbersome to fellow patrons, and makes your own table a tight squeeze. The same goes for infants and toddlers who need a high chair, as it sometimes requires a different table.

“For me, it’s just, kind of a safety thing for the kiddo, I don’t want to put a 10-week-old baby in one of the main walkways of the dining room,” Murphy explained.

At the end of the day, remembering that staff — specifically hosts — are people just trying to do their jobs is key.

“Just understanding that we’re people at work … hospitality is something that we love and take a lot of pride in, and just understanding that we are people, too,” he continued.

“When someone is genuinely interested, or kind or understanding … it opens up that realm and allows us to connect with you on a level.”