My wife and I decided to drive the 19 miles from home to Skeptical Chymist to see our good friend perform on a Thursday night. We have been here a few times before and love the atmosphere, food and beer selections.
We arrived at exactly 7:00pm and I had to use the men's room so my wife found a table. After the few minutes it took me to clean up and found her standing at the table she wanted covered in the mess from the previous guests. There were several other empty tables in the restaurant but my wife like this vantage point of the stage. I sat down and waited a while as we watched servers making their rounds and one even walked by and gave us a courteous smile but kept on walking. We agreed that he must not be our server. I walked up to the bar to read the beer selection chalkboard and returned to the table. Still no server. It is now nearly 7:10. My wife flagged down a mid to late 20 year old male with a tightly pulled back, short pony tail. My wife asked if he knew who our server was. He just replied with "Why did you need something?" My wife said, "Yes, we need our table cleaned and want to place our order." He proceeded to walk away without a response. We sat for another entire song of Jay's set and my wife finally decided to go to the bar to order us a round. As she was approaching the bar, the server came to the table and asked if she was going to the bathroom as he watched her standing at the bar. I told him she was ordering our drinks. He said, "Nice" and finished wiping down the table. Yes, he was only wiping down the table 15 minutes after we arrived and was upset because we decided to get our own drinks at the bar.
We had nearly finished our first drinks and he had not returned to the table with a menu or to see how things were. I finally had to go find a table that had a menu on it. We made our choices and still waited. It is now nearly 7:30 and he is wiping down a table near us so I got up and confronted him in a heated tone as I told him how unacceptable his service has been. I tried to turn it on us that we went to the bar and it was "confusing" to him. He was obviously being facetious and I called him on it. He asked me what I wanted him to do. I told him to tell one of the other servers to come take our order.
He came by our table a few minutes later and made no attempt to recover the situation and only continued to tell us how "confusing" it is when a customer goes to the bar to get their drink rather than wait for him. I was so angry that I told my wife I wanted to leave. This was disappointing because we had come to see Jay play and enjoy dinner.
We went outside and calmed down. Rather than go find another place to eat and miss out on Jay's performance we decided to go back in and find a seat at the bar. We ended up staying until 9:00 and happily gave our dinner and drinks tip to the bartender.
I really don't think this young man has any business being in the service industry. Unfortunately, I believe he has been at Skeptical Chymist for quite a while so I would have to put this behavior back on management.