Leaving a Bad Tip - What's Warranted?
beach
Cait and I are compulsively consistent tippers. The vast majority of the time, no matter the experience, we're leaving 20%. Took a little while to get seated? 20 %. Waiter forgets to bring waters even when you ask 4 times? 20%. Appetizers don't come out until 30 seconds before the entrees? 20%.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm bragging about this. I feel horribly guilty when I consider leaving less than 20%, and I'm absolutely terrified of karma. I've convinced myself that anything less than a 20% tip is going to result in my immediate downfall. But we recently broke our self-imposed tipping policy when we encountered the perfect shitstorm of restaurant chaos.
After hanging out on Nantasket beach for the first time, we decided to check out the roof deck at The Red Parrot. The place is exactly what you'd expect/want when you're trying to find a place to eat after a day on the beach. A big roof deck overlooking the beach, perfect summer music and lots of frozen drinks to choose from. Unfortunately, on this day at least, The Parrot fell very flat.We walked up the steps to the roof deck to find the hostess station empty, and nobody seemed particularly interested in acknowledging us. There were a few tables open, and being a party of two with nobody waiting in front of us, we figured it'd be a short wait. When the hostess did get to us, she opted to let us stand directly over another table instead of sitting us down.
As more people started coming up to the deck, also finding an empty hostess station, they decided to seat themselves. We didn't want to lose our table, so we simply asked the hostess if she'd prefer if we also sat ourselves. She huffed and puffed, and she tossed our menus on a table and stalked off without a word. Fine. Just one person. But it didn't get much better from there. Our waitress was much more polite than the hostess, but it took her 10 minutes just to get to our table, and another ten to take our drink and appetizer orders. Another ten minutes from there and we had somewhat frozen drinks at our table and she'd taken our food orders. Almost 40 minutes in and we're just getting our drinks.Long story short, the mussels (which were admittedly pretty damn good) came out 30 minutes after we ordered them, and the main course (a burger and a chicken caeser wrap) took over an hour to get to the table from the time we ordered.
All relatively simple food at a quick stop restaurant somehow turned into a nearly two-hour long excursion out in the hot sun. When the food finally did come, we asked for boxes and our check so we could get the hell out of there.The tab came to about 65 bucks, and we left a $6.50 tip. I felt great about our 10% tip in the moment, but afterwards I felt like the biggest douche on the planet.
After all, all that really happened was one rude person and an extremely long wait.So the basic question here is what's your tipping recourse when you have a bad experience at a restaurant? Is 10% the right way to send a message? Should I have left even less? Am I an impatient jerk and 10% wasn't enough? What's your policy on tipping when a restaurant sends you to your wit's end?