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| - Thursday night. Bites and Brews was buzzing with business. My friends and I stood in the doorway, shifting our weight, uncertain of what to do. No one had greeted us.
"Do we seat ourselves?" we asked a waitress as she rushed past us.
"Uh, yeah!" she shot over her shoulder.
So we seated ourselves. And then the same waitress came over to our table. "Can I get you something to drink?"
"Umm..." We paused. Maybe a nanosecond too long.
"Your options are on the chalkboard," she spat, and probably would have added 'idiots' to that statement if she hadn't wanted a tip.
"Oh, uh..."
She stared at us, her eyes nervously glancing around the restaurant. Something was up. After a minute, we ordered drinks, and then took a look at the "checklist" menu, a novel idea for a restaurant that is ostensibly DIY.
The drinks arrived. We finished our checklists. The waitress whisked the checklists away to the kitchen.
And that's when the minutes whisked away, too.
Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. Forty minutes. A different waitress buzzed by us. Then our waitress. Then another one. Suddenly, there seemed to be eighteen waitresses in the restaurant. We stopped one. Where was our food? She looked at us, and her eyes shifted over to the kitchen. There, in front of the restaurant, a waitress was hollering at a cook. "What do you mean 'you flipped it?'" she screamed. "They've been waiting forever!" The argument shifted locations: to the front of the bar, to doorway to the back kitchen, then back to the floor. It was a Battle Royale.
Our ersatz waitress glanced back at us. "Uh... there's a bit of a problem in the kitchen tonight." So she brought us another round of beer.
After an hour, our food arrived. It was okay. Not great. Certainly not wait-for-an-hour great... or even wait-for-an-hour good, at that. But it was food. And we were hungry. And, with the exception of our first round of drinks, the entire bill was comped. So. Win-win.
I guess.
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