All of us eat out at restaurants for one reason or another.

• Maybe we are tired after a long day and don’t want to slave over a hot stove.
• Maybe we have to entertain a client.
• Maybe we are celebrating a ‘special’ occasion.
• Maybe it is a family night out.
• Maybe the team is meeting up after practice.

No matter what the reason, when we go to a restaurant, weird stuff happens and sometimes we can’t understand why it does.  Well worry no more.  I have identified a number of things that probably drive you crazy and will do you the service of explaining why they happen.

The restaurant business is a great business, second to none in my books. I managed restaurants for years and owned a couple as well.  I enjoyed being an owner/operator and delivering my special brand of product and service.

As an owner, every day you have the opportunity to improve on what you did the day before.  You can open your doors on a new day of business and:

• You can deliver better service.
• You can serve a better product.
• You can be a little more efficient in the kitchen.
• Your physical plant can be a little cleaner.
• You can be more attentive to your employees.

That’s the restaurant business.  You can be better today than you were yesterday – if you want to be.  Unfortunately, most owners fail to capitalize on that fact and just live the same day over and over and customers, like us, have to put up with their ongoing ineptitude.

What I identify in this blog are some of the things that drive me (and you) nuts and are all correctable.  In each case, the ‘Explanation’ is so simple that you’ll be left wondering why the owner hasn’t changed things already.

I suggest that everybody who has ever been a customer at a restaurant read this and also give it to every restaurant owner they know.  Maybe those owners will change their ways.  If they do, all of us will benefit.

Strangely enough we have been putting up with this stuff for years.  That is also very weird.  When we enter a restaurant, we lose our backbone and tolerate stuff we never would tolerate in any other business.

For example, if we were left alone in a change room in a clothing store with nothing to try on or if we were given a shirt with only one arm attached to it, would we suffer in silence?  Heck no.  But in a restaurant when they neglect us or give us something different from what we ordered, we do.  Why?  Weird, isn’t it.

For the most part, it is because we think that the restaurant business is different, that it is difficult.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The restaurant business is actually a simple business.  The problem is that restaurant owners and restaurant managers make the business more complicated than they should.  They ignore the simple things and concentrate on the complicated stuff or what they think is the complicated stuff.  They don’t fix the easy stuff and it is the easy stuff that we all notice and it drives us nuts.

What sort of stuff?

Try these on for size.