The rude, the bad and the ugly

Have you ever gone to a restaurant with someone who behaved in a way that embarrassed you? Yeah, me too.

My niece once ordered a plate of pasta, and when she said she didn’t want the tomato sauce that it came with, her mother -- my sister -- nodded understandingly, picked up the plate, took it into the ladies’ room, washed all the sauce off and returned to her now-happy daughter with a plate of soggy, sauceless pasta.

Then there was the good longtime friend who used to routinely show up at restaurants so late that my wife and I had to delay ordering for fear we’d be eating dessert by the time she waltzed in. This, of course, upset both the kitchen and the wait staff and meant that whoever had reserved our table after us wouldn’t be seated on time.

I spoke to my friend several times about her habitual tardiness, to no avail. Finally I got so angry -- and so tired of apologizing to waiters -- that one night, when there was still no sign of our friend 30 minutes after we’d arrived, I put my wristwatch in her wineglass. I left it there after she finally arrived -- and I refused to take it out ... or to let her take it out ... or to let the waiter bring her a new glass.

She drank only water that night.

She hasn’t been late for dinner with us since.

Restaurateurs are disinclined to be so direct with rude, thoughtless customers, and they’re even reluctant to talk about such customers by name. But they’re happy (if that’s the right word) to share their favorite tales of bad customer behavior.

If my conversations and personal observations are any indication, many folks who frequent restaurants on the Westside seem especially inconsiderate. For some reason -- wealth? power? status? genes? -- they have a sense of entitlement that often leads them to behave in a most boorish and arrogant manner. They arrive late or don’t show up at all. They talk loudly on their cellphones. They demand tables -- and only certain, well-situated tables -- at the last minute. They reserve for four people and show up with eight -- or reserve for eight and show up with four. And they complain, all the time, about everything.

“I had more complaints from customers in the first three weeks we were open in West Hollywood than I’ve had in the 13 years I’ve been open in Pasadena,” says Xiomara Ardolina, owner of Xiomara restaurants in both cities. “It’s all about ‘me, me, me’ in West Hollywood.

“One guy refused to leave a tip because he said his waitress didn’t properly describe his lamb shank,” she says. “Another guy said he wanted a vegetarian menu and got upset because we didn’t have the exact vegetables he wanted. ‘You’re in West Hollywood now,’ he said. ‘You have to have these vegetables.’ ”

On a recent Saturday night, Ardolina says, a party of 10 booked a table for 8 o’clock. The first members of the group began arriving at 8, but the entire party -- which turned out to be eight people, not 10 -- was not complete until nearly 8:30, and it was almost 9 o’clock before they were ready to order appetizers.

“They had a lot to drink -- a lot,” Ardolina says, “and at 9:45, one guy came out [to the hostess] and said it was his birthday and he was tired of waiting for the main courses and he demanded free desserts for the whole table. Ten minutes later, we put all their main courses on the table -- and they got up and screamed at me and walked out, without eating or paying.”

Ardolina says they claimed to have political connections and threatened her with “visits by inspectors every day.”

Ardolina acknowledges that service in the restaurant was “a little slow that night” but not slow enough, she says, to prompt such an outburst. “Besides, when was the last time you were in a department store and couldn’t find a salesman right away and you had to wait a long time? You don’t say, ‘I want a free pillow because you kept me waiting.’ ”

Attitude and thievery

Chris Schaefer, the proprietor of Zax in Brentwood, says too many customers “have attitude. They come in with chips on their shoulders. If something goes even a little bit wrong, they don’t give you the opportunity to make the situation better, they start berating you. If they don’t like the table you take them to, they don’t say, ‘I’d really rather not sit here’ or ‘Do you have another table?’ Instead, they scream at you and attack you as if you’re somehow deliberately screwing them over.”

Schaefer says his biggest problem is thievery.

“People steal everything,” he says, “silverware, salt and pepper shakers, wine coasters, the small flashlights we hand out if you need more light to read the menu -- everything. We used to have conical glass vases with tropical fish in them, hanging on the wall in our ladies’ room. Women would flush the fish and the water down the toilet and steal the vases.

“We even had people steal pictures out of their frames and hang the empty frames back on the bathroom wall.”

The complaint I hear over and over from restaurateurs is that too many customers “seem to think they’re the only customers in the restaurant that night,” as Frank Delzio, co-owner of Josie’s restaurant in Santa Monica, puts it.

“One night a guy got up and dimmed the lights in the whole restaurant so much that people couldn’t read their menus. I turned them back up. He dimmed them again. I asked him to please not do that. When I walked away, he turned them all the way up, so it was almost blindingly bright.

“When I again asked him not to do that, he got mad and said, ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ ”

Another widespread problem, also well articulated by Delzio:

“Everyone wants to eat at 7:30. But neither our kitchen staff nor our wait staff can handle 80 people at 7:30. So I offer some people 7:15 and they say, ‘That’s too early,’ or I suggest 7:45 and they say, ‘That’s too late’ -- or they just hang up and don’t say anything.”

Los Angeles diners are notorious for wanting chefs to change recipes, add or subtract certain ingredients or make dishes that aren’t on the menu.

Delzio says a woman who showed up 40 minutes late for her reservation not long ago ordered a Caesar salad and a poached chicken breast -- neither of which the restaurant serves.

“So she ordered a mixed green salad, with dressing on the side -- and sent it back because it had radishes,” he says. “I gave her a chicken breast with skin on it, and she said it was repulsive -- and then she insisted on letting it sit there the whole meal. I offered to skin it, to take it away or to replace it, but she wouldn’t touch it and she wouldn’t let me touch it.”

Maureen Vincenti of Vincenti restaurant in Brentwood still bristles over “this person who came in and asked for ‘fettuccine Alfredo with cream and peas.’ When I said that our chef doesn’t make that dish and we didn’t have any fresh peas in the kitchen that day, he said, ‘That’s awful. Other restaurants do that dish for us all the time.’

“Then he and his party got up and walked out.”

The Westside doesn’t have a monopoly on loutishness, of course. When Piero Selvaggio, owner of Valentino in Santa Monica, also owned Posto in the San Fernando Valley, he used to wail in disbelief about some of his Valley customers.

They would insist on bringing in their own desserts. And their own bottled water. And they’d order only one appetizer salad apiece and no main course, ask to have their bread basket refilled several times -- and then take a lot of the bread home with them.

I know that restaurateurs and their wait staffs sometimes behave rudely or unreasonably too, and I suspect I’ll hear from more than a few readers on that score. Good. If I do, I’ll write a column about it. Meanwhile, let me leave you with my favorite recent story on customer behavior -- a customer who, in this instance, behaved badly not toward the restaurant staff but toward his own companion.

“Two months ago, a man and a woman came here on a blind date,” says Joe Baylis, manager of the Water Grill in downtown Los Angeles. “The guy must not have liked her because midway through the meal, he gets up, comes to the hostess stand and says he wants to pay his share and leave quietly. He just walks out and leaves her sitting there, eating and wondering where he is. About 30 minutes later, she comes up and asks if her date’s in the men’s room.”

Ouch.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous Matters of Taste columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.