Never work in hospitality. Strangest things people have complained about.

[KnopkaPixie]

Here's some to get us started:

"There's broken glass on this steak."
It was fancy coarse ground salt.

"I can't eat from a square plate. It's bad feng shui."

Any more?

Lady in the pub I worked in ordered a bottle of 0% alcohol beer, I showed and said "this 0% one?" She said yes, I opened it then she complained it was non alcoholic and called me a moron. 🤔

Steak tartare is great. We often had it at home when I was young. And no. We weren't posh (non uk). My brother still gets groupon type vouchers whenever one nearby him is on offer.
Get good meat and make it at home if needed. 😁

There's a MrBean episode where he also didn't know what steak tartare was.

It's easy to make it yourself - the cost of buying the fillet steak from a butcher is still a lot less than you'd pay for even a cheap restaurant meal. I often make it in summer as an alternative to salad-based meals when it's too hot to cook.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/steaktartare_88981

ETA if you made it and didn't like it you could then fry the steak instead and have a steak sandwich 😄

Ah, like the 'Mac' burger/Mac'n'cheese mix up earlier, that sounds like a genuine mistake and the man wasn't angry or unreasonable about it, so the staff should have been more discreet at the very least.

Eating out causes a quite a bit of social anxiety for some people and I hope that nowhere I've worked has ever been snotty to a nervous customer or made them feel inferior.

Even the ones with oddball tastes are OK, as long as they carry out their menu modifications at the table DIY style. I've seen Swedish people put mayonnaise on a wood fired oven pizza at my local pizzeria and the family are Sicilian but don't flinch and just put the squeezy bottle on the table with the order in anticipation of this whenever the diner looks or sounds even vaguely Nordic.

Mind you, I've heard that you can get baked in the cheese banana as pizza topping in Scandinavia and old Tony can't go down to that level, not since he's had a pacemaker fitted.

That's one of my favourite sketches. The bit where he picks up the woman's handbag and points indignantly at the contents always makes me laugh out loud!

That is a really good idea!

I thought the spellings were just variations used by different countries to refer to the same thing. I'd assume steak tartare was trying to be French and posh or something.

I used to get Northern Irish ten pound notes from my granny at Christmas and birthdays and had to ask for a manager EVERY SINGLE TIME in the bank who would then have to ring someone higher up usually to confirm that, yes, it was legal tender and they could accept it. Mahoosive pain in the hole.

A Christmas party, huge one where you got half bottle of wine in the ticket price. Man shouted at me that he expected his half in a separate bottle. I gave him 3 glasses and told him to pour his half into them.

Worked on the front desk of an upmarket hotel.

"My friend is deaf. What are you going to do about it!?" After probing, she meant...her friend is deaf, what are we going to do if the hotel has a fire.

"It's snowing and we can't go outside and enjoy the hotel grounds. We want a refund!"

When looking for wedding venues there was more than one place where the only vegetarian option was fish. I argued with one place that simple would not believe me (a life long veggie) that fish is in fact not vegetarian and said the menu is the menu. After that I just instantly striked off any place without suitable options clearly listed.

One even had pork listed as the vegetarian option but we didn't view that venue as I striked it off.

Like how does that happen? what brain cells do they lack.

This is partly the fault of these people that declare themselves to be vegan/vegetarian/whatever and then eat something that doesn't fit. They make it seem as though all of us don't care.

Food labelling regulations are strict about this, for good reason. It has to be standardised. There is a distinction between 'free' or 'added' sugars and naturally occurring sugars, but it's very important that the natural sugar content is listed especially for people with conditions such as diabetes.
Listing as an asterix section outwith the ingredients would not meet the regulations and the sugar content would still have to be listed with a quantifiable value. Natural sugars are still treated as sugar by the body's digestive system.

That customer in the other post was just bloody idiotic to think that there was no sugar in dried fruit. It's what makes dried fruit so bad for children's teeth! Dehydration concentrates the fruit sugars & makes the fruit sticky & chewy.
Why tf did she think it tasted sweet?!
I'd love to know how the PP's head office responded to the complaint.

I once had a customer who asked for a fried egg sandwich. Then complained that the butter had melted on the bread under the warm egg!

That's the best bit!

What a ghastly experience, @LemonadeSunshine. I'm so sorry, and 🥇 for your husband. Bizarre about the restaurant - maybe they're so plagued by customers' awful behaviour that they simply ignore whatever happens? 😳

Can I add one where I was the customer?! I had to request a plate when a local pub served my toddler’s lunch on a NON-STICK frying pan… I wasn’t bothered that it was a pan, but the Teflon coating had taken a battering from all the previous customers and was flaking off onto the food…! 🍳 So they rolled their eyes and returned with the same food having been scraped onto a plate; Complete with Teflon sprinkles

There are pillow alarms linked to the audible alarms which vibrate to wake the sleeper. It would not be unreasonable to expect an upmarket and presumably expensive hotel to have some. My own fire risk assessor in my lowly holiday let recommended we have one.

My own unreasonable reqiest was from some central London guests who asked me to do something about the field mice living in the drystone wall at the bottom of the garden ( rural North Wales). I resisted the temptation to tell them their London garden was probably frequented by rats.

@LoonaandalfPLEASE PLEASE PLEEEEASE tell me there wasn’t……that it wasn’t true

Oh, yes, we had the alarms, I gave her one and explained how it worked. It was the fact she came to the desk not telling me her friend was deaf and only said "my friend is deaf, what are you going to do about it?" and I had to probe to find out what she meant. If she said "my friend is deaf" from the beginning of the conversation I would have understood. It will remain a funny anecdote for me 😂

A man my dad worked with, he took his wife to a fancy restaurant about 30 years ago. He ordered the Beef Tomato. When his plate arrived he asked where the Beef was.

sounds very urban myth. Why would there ever be a dish on a menu that was just a large tomato?

Not hospitality but retail where a woman screamed in my face because I couldn’t sell her “back and white ink” for her printer, and could only give her black.

Similar to the field mice, I've had complaints about loud birds:
"Was it a cockerel crowing?"
"Nah, it's these big fat things, sit in the tree first thing in the morning going, 'Booby, booby, booby!"

I could have thought of something colourful and slightly risque to say but I resisted the temptation.

The most recent one for me was a lovely sounding lasagne with feta cheese but it was labelled as vegan. I’m veggie not vegan but I queried the cheese as if it was a vegan sub I would choose something else. No it was genuine feta as feta is vegan. The waiter even checked with the chef.

I ordered it, the feta was real and the whole dish was delicious.