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| - This is the strangest and arguably the worst restaurant experience I have ever had. We came into this restaurant craving Japanese dining. I was with a blind friend (white cane, etc), a retired US Army Ranger who served 21 years.
I have been a global business traveler for decades, as has my friend. We have been all around the world, and between us could not come up with another story to match this. It has been 6 weeks since then, and it still feels just as ugly as it did then. If I was to rank restaurant experiences from worst to first out of over 2,000 such experiences, I would rank this one as the single worst.
We were in town for a martial arts tournament. We stepped in and were greeted coldly by the "host", which seemed very odd as we were kind, quiet and polite. We were well dressed and ... again, my friend is clearly blind.
It was 6:20pm on a weekday. They asked us to wait. I looked around the restaurant. There were a total of two tables with customers seated. The entire rest of the place was empty. We stood there, feeling awkward about this for over 20 minutes. It was beyond strange.
We were literally ignored as the hosts walked right by and completely avoided us repeatedly. We were the only ones there, so rather hard to ignore unless intentional. It clearly felt like they had decided not to serve us. It seemed to be their thinking that if they could avoid seating us, then they would avoid serving us, and if they avoided acknowledging our existence further, they could avoid seating us.
I whispered to my friend in jest after 15+ minutes that perhaps they do not serve people of his ethnicity. After a few more minutes, we uneasily realized that this may actually be the case, and that there was some kind of very strange behavior going on here. We are at a loss to explain it any other way. We had kindly inquired as to availability of seating twice now and were literally ignored as though we were fish in a tank they were passing by.
We finally left in disgust, walked across the street and had a very nice Chinese meal. Looking back at it, it is hard for me to grok that it really did happen this way, but indeed it did.
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