Written and photographed by Leah Sarnoff
I was working as a hostess at a fancy restaurant in the Financial District where a large part of my job was manning the coat check. We had a lot of regulars, and one, in particular, was famous among the staff for being a generous tipper and infamous for strange quirks and even stranger dress. He always sat at the same table, ordered the same dish and demanded that his coat be waiting for him immediately after the check was dropped.
On this particular day, his coat was covered in combed zebra hair and lined with black leather and metal studs. It looked and felt like the poacher’s safari of my nightmares. What was a vegetarian gal supposed to do? Like any good employee, I buried my pride, pocketed my $5 tip and accepted the writing material.
While the customer is always right, they can also be unruly. I turned it around and asked San Franciscans in the food service industry about their worst restaurant stories.
Lotion on the Side
Amber Esparza
“I was a cashier at Chipotle for two years, and one time, this woman got a burrito bowl. While she was going down the line picking out ingredients, she pointed at the sour cream and said, ‘Can I get lotion?’ I just looked at her so confused and was like, ‘Ummm you mean sour cream?’ She just looked so mad that she was wrong.”
Rat Race
Colby Landry
“I worked at a restaurant that had a problem with rats and mice, and since it was a new restaurant and mostly glass and facing outside, we used to have things scurry across the floor all the time, and we’d have to go deal with it and put out traps. One time I stepped in a trap. It was one of those super-sticky ones, and it took, like, a full 30 minutes for the bartender to get it off my shoe.”
Brazil Knows Best
Jacob Luna
“I work at a smoothie / açaí bowl place in the Marina. We had a customer who was from Brazil come in, and he did not like the way we made the bowls. So we had to keep remaking his until it was to his specification. We made it twice all the way through, and then we started making little samples to see if he liked them. Eventually, I just called the manager and said, ‘Some guy is hanging through the window, telling us how to make the bowls.’”
Renee Zellweger
Danase Louis
“One time Renee Zellweger came into my restaurant, and she literally refused to eat with anything larger than a cocktail fork. So we had to keep changing out her tiny fork (that’s just for shellfish) for her three-course dinner.”
Slippery When Wet
Anonymous
“I was working at the Whole Foods in Berkeley, and we had crazy people come in literally every day. One time, we had a spill, so we put out a bunch of those bright-yellow cones that said ‘Caution.’ I was working the counter when I [saw] this woman [look at] the cones and — I kid you not—she just started running full sprint toward them. I watched her fake-slip, pretend to hit her head and then listen to her scream over and over, ‘Help! Help! I’m unconscious. I’m slipping in and out of consciousness!’ She laid there for a solid five minutes before she realized nobody was paying attention to her faking. Then she just got up and left.”
Table Tantrum
Amalia Diaz
“I was a hostess, and it was a really sunny day, and our restaurant had outside seating. This lady really wanted to sit in the shade, but those tables had a waiting list. She sassed me so hard and just started acting like a child (and she was a fully grown adult). She thought it was my fault that she couldn’t get the table she wanted. I’m just doing my job, and you’re just eating.”
The Art of Distraction
Aaron Mardueno
“At my restaurant we noticed this casual little cockroach walking on the wall right next to a table. Me, the manager and the table’s server were just trying to assess the situation and figure out the best way to approach killing it and getting it off the wall without alerting the guests to its existence. The table had ordered a bottle of wine, so we came up with the idea to have the server go over and present it and, during, kind of pretend to lose her footing and hit the bug on the wall and take it off. After she did it, no one was the wiser, and it was probably the funniest thing I’ve ever seen trying to plan and operate. Don’t worry—we took care of the situation, and the restaurant is all good now.”
Got Buns, Hun?
Keanu Morin
“Weird things happen all the time, especially around San Francisco. At our restaurant, a customer came in and ordered a cheeseburger. Even before he got the burger, he was annoying and being really hard to deal with. When he got his burger, the top bun was a tiny bit too toasted for his liking. So I go over to him, and he just hands me the bun and starts yelling across the restaurant to the kitchen, screaming his head off.”
BYOB
Erika Correa
“These customers come in, looking a little sketchy, we already know something’s not right, and then we see that they have brought their own bottle of alcohol. They ask for two glasses and proceed to pour it under the bar. I had to be the one to say, ‘You gotta go. You can’t do this here.’ They were pissed off and smashed their bottle in the front of the place and made a total scene.”
