Signs of a Bad Restaurant    mp3

Monday lunch hour is the time I peruse news articles for topics to write about for my weekly column. I start with certain news websites where I know I can always find an irrelevant, inane non-news article to spur my creativity. Such was the case this past week, when I read a piece about signs the reader has picked a bad restaurant. These signs included such low grade problems as: an offering of several featured drinks ending in -tini, the waiter telling patrons “leave room for dessert,” or a menu including identity-less appetizers such as hot wings or beer nuggets. These are not signs of a bad restaurant, only of a certain kind of big chain eatery specializing in jamming artificial fun into your gullet. As restaurants go, you can do much worse. Here are some signs you did:

1) Restaurant workers are dressed in overalls and not much else – You have truly entered the realm of “bad restaurant” when the wait staff, cooks, or bus personnel are wearing apparel more suitable for farming, grave digging, or sewer repairing. Restaurant workers should not look as if they slept in their work clothes, washed them in a cesspool, or cannot afford to own a shirt. I do not mean to discount certain topless establishments; they fill an important niche as gentlemen's or ladies' clubs. But good restaurants maintain a dress code that at minimum tells patrons, “Our employees bathe.”

2) The restaurant doors stick – Another true sign of a bad restaurant is multi-year layers of accumulated grease and grime that form an adhesive rim around entrance doors, an opaque film on windows blocking all but the brownish hues of sunlight, and a grip on shoes that feels akin to donning lead footwear. Beware of restaurants that keep their lights dimmed; the ambiance of romance and intimacy may only be a by-product of attempts to conceal unsanitary conditions and grease consuming critters.

3) There is only one worker – If you enter an establishment to find the maitre d' is also the cook, busboy, and toilet scrubber, don't count on anything better than a mediocre dining experience. A jack-of-all-trades has no time to become a master at any of them. Perhaps worse is the restaurant with two employees performing three times a normal work load; tensions are high, boiling points are low, and all it takes is for you to order a slightly-more-difficult-than-normal-to-prepare entree before dishes start crashing like those around a bush league plate juggler. At least when there is only one worker, he has no one to scream profane orders to.

4) There are more seats at the bar than at tables – If your eating destination puts more emphasis on drinking than eating, or employs more bartenders than wait staff, call your eating establishment what it is: a bar. I'm not saying bars and pubs don't serve good food, some do. But if you want restaurant variety and atmosphere, a drinking establishment won't give it to you. Remember, people go to bars not to eat but to drink, and the bigger the bar, the higher probability you'll encounter a loud drunk imposing his belligerent views on patrons at your table. Let me also add: if the restaurant has more than one large screen TV tuned to a sports channel, or any TV screen visible from the dining area, the restaurant is really a bar in disguise.

5) There are more children than adults – A good restaurant will offer none of the following: a play area, an arcade, kiddie activity placemats, crayons, a kids menu, or any other facilities catering to humans under the age of twelve. That is, unless they are tucked nicely away in a back room, brat pit, or kiddie dungeon designed to trap the sound of high-pitched screamy voices and limit the excessive movements of little sugar-fueled bodies.

6) The restaurant is inside a Super-HugeMart store or a hospital – Fine dining indeed.