At Your Service: Top 10 Etiquette Tips for Restaurant Servers

[Journeyman]

3. I would add (from recent experience), "Don't quit your job in the middle of serving me." . . .

Don't know what the story was, but the waiter was friendly enough, we had good rapport, he took our order and disappeared into the kitchen. There were five of us, with a small child.

We didn't notice it at first -- the busboy brought our drinks and we had food for the little girl -- but after 20 minutes or so we began to wonder what had happened to our food. We flagged down the busboy, told him we hadn't seen our waiter since he took our order, and asked if he could find him for us. About 5 minutes later, a different waiter came out, told us there'd been a foul-up in the kitchen, and the restaurant wanted to make good on it by giving us a couple of appetizers and discounting our meal. We laughed, said 'Sure,' he passed out new menus and placed our order.

Later, the busboy told me no one knew what happened to our waiter. He just gathered his belongings and walked out, taking our order with him and stranding a handful of tables.