My parents took me out for my 14th birthday
to the new restaurant that had opened a few miles away. This was an experience as we usually only ventured as far as the local Beefeater chain.

It was really great. The food was excellent, the service really friendly, the atmosphere congenial. Well, I think they were. My memories are somewhat clouded by biting into my pudding and getting a ring-pull from can of coke stuck between my teeth.

Sure, they apologised, but next week we were back at the Beefeater.
( chthonic, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 10:30, Reply)

It's always me
I always seem to be the one to end up with the pube/listeria/toenail clipping in my food. Two of my fondest moments are...

When I was a kid we had a Chinese takeaway one evening. I complained bitterly that the spring roll tasted really foul and was sent to my bedroom for being a moaning, ungrateful brat. It was only after I had stormed upstairs in a huff that my dad tasted the offending spring roll and found that it was caked in MSG that the takeaway spilled over it.

I went to a parent's evening at my sister's everso posh boarding school and there was a buffet laid on with dishes provided by the mums - all very jolly hockey sticks. I tucked into some tomato salad only to find a sticking plaster staring back at me. It wasn't even one of those blue catering ones.
(absurdistan, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 10:18, Reply)

Onion Bhajis are bad for your health
Workmate went to the local Curryhouse avec girlfriend for standard curry. She found a cigarrette but in the onion bhajis (Luckily before she ate it). Nearly threw up. Never been back.
(jimmy_stavros, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 10:05, Reply)

for my birthday

My then-girlfriend said we could have anything I wanted for dinner. My answer of 'cheese on toast with wedges on it' led to a storm of rage. I got my second choice, pizza, and unfortunately watched 'Interview With the Vampire'.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 9:55, Reply)

Singapore Airlines

Have pretty nice food, but they don't know what 'vegan' means - it's made a bit more annoying by the fact that the people who book you in act like they do.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 9:53, Reply)

Chick chick chick chick chicken
Some friends went on holiday to a certain Asian country, and, as you do, got a bit peckish.

They went to a very basic streetside eatery, parked themselves on the plastic chairs and told the owner they would like some chicken. The owner nodded, smiled, grabbed a chicken that was walking past, and promptly killed it.

Apparently it tasted pretty good. Fresh, at least.
(Pachey, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 9:41, Reply)

lost_jonson
I too have suffered the evils of La Porchetta Muswell Hill! Loved the liquid pizza. Thought it seemed just a tad runny, so as an experiment I lifted one side of it. Everything on top (cheese, toppings) poured off onto the plate like soup. Nice.

This is the restaurant that became famous in the area for being featured on 'Life of Grime'-type tv shows *twice*.
(cface run. Run, face, run!, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 9:33, Reply)

Curry House..
3 mates, 3 meals.....me & mate 1 - Fine.
Mate 2 - not fine....he found a gold tooth filling in his curry..nice, pre-chewed food...bloody dirty gits! And to make matters worse, Mate 1 did not want to leave without paying!!
(smirker neverletmetellyabouttheraggamuffinbiznessandting!, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 9:31, Reply)

Valentine's Meal
I had recently got together with my girlfriend, and I decided to take her somewhere nice for Valentine's Day, so that we could understand each other more deeply over a glass of red wine and candle-lit dinner.

So there we are, parked up in a cosy corner, when some guy sits down next to us with his guitar and sings. Loudly. And depressingly. He wasn't even very good. As an attempt to get rid of him, I gave money, but it was a small restaurant and I think this was the only place for him to sit. So for two hours, and about £80, I listened to some guy playing the guitar.

The girl was annoyed that I didn't ask him to go away, so we had a bit of a fight about whether I should have said anything. And then she went home on her own, and didn't speak to me for a week.
(blowski, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 9:23, Reply)

The meal that wouldn't die
On holiday in Canada my partner and I went into a large and brightly-lit Chinese restaurant in Vancouver. It was full of people, so we figured it must be pretty good.

As is often in the case in Chinese restaurants the menu was a bit indecipherable so we ordered a few tasty looking dishes. As we waited for the meal to arrive a woman inexplicably turned up and served us with cups of piss-weak cold black tea. We attempted to communicate that we wanted beer instead, but the waitress, who didn't speak any English, seemed to be insisting that piss-weak cold black tea was what we wanted to drink with our meal so piss-weak cold black tea was what we had.

The food, when it turned up looked pretty appetising. However, on closer inspection it turned out to be harbouring a variety of unidentifiable vegetables and suspicious looking wobbly bits. Sifting out the worse of these and trying a few morsels didn't improve things as the dishes tasted bland at best. And they didn't go with the piss-weak cold black tea at all.

We thought we'd better eat some to look polite. Bad mistake. Taking it as a sign of encouragement the waitress bought further things that we hadn't ordered to our table. These proved no better than the things we'd picked but we attempted to eat some anyway. We began to feel quite sick.

Eventually, we gave up trying to eat and asked for the bill over a huge mountain of uneaten food. This earned us disapproving glares but, thankfully, the food was piled up and taken away. Just having the wretched stuff removed from under our noses made us feel a bit better.

The bill was bought back shortly afterward and we paid and got ready to leave. But just as we were about to make our escape the waitress appeared again and handed us two plastic bags which held the remains of the meal carefully sorted and packed into take away containers! Gaah! Was there no getting away from this dreadful food?

We threw it in the first bin we found down the road and got some chips and we never went in another Chinese the whole three weeks we were in Canada.
(MattDP (Squiggle), Fri 28 Apr 2006, 8:45, Reply)

in edinburgh ...
any chinese buffet restaurant ... canteen food that looks like horse spew under hotlights ... not good

also, every last fucking style bar has the cocking inability to fucking clean their fucking wine glasses ... you wait 20 minutes for a self obsessed "waitress" to take an order and she returns at some later point with the dregs of yesterday's Cab Sauv topped up with today's Cab Sauv poured into a glass that's been through a luke warm glass washing machine and THE FUCKING THING still has indelible lipstick on the side and dried detergent stains ... so you ask for a clean glass and? they pour the SAME CUNTING WINE into a slightly less dirty glass ... [continues in this vein for some hours]
( writerblock ... embedding disabled by request on, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 8:26, Reply)

A Picnic at Terry Venable's House
Around the time of El Tels falling out with Alan Sugar myself and Paul Merton were invited for a lovely candlelight supper (in the style of Hyacinth Bucket/Bouquet) round at cockney Terry's gaff. Me and Paul spent the journey there indulging in jolly banter. He'd come at me with "you think you're me", to which I'd respond "what an odd thing to say" and then we'd start laughing. Paul despises bad grammar and irrelevency. He's a bit of an old twat to be honest.

So we were doing our best Hyacinth Bucket impressions. I was screeching "Emmettttttt!!!" and "RRRRRRRichard" and he'd come back back with "Vicarrrrr". Great days. It was all spoiled however when we arrived at Terry's house to find him absolutely pissed. He spent the entire night ranting about Alan Sugar's beard "its a shit beard isn't it" he repeated endlessly.

It got worse when we discovered the meal he had prepared was a Penguin biscuit each and a glass of bleach.

Me and Paul made our excuses and left. I think my excuse was "my shin bone has become sarcastic". Paul was unhappy as he seemed to think he'd said this at some point before and I was plagiarising his work or some daft nonsense.
(Andrew Avetoom, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 8:15, Reply)

The evil twin
In north London there is a chain of pizza place called La Porchetta. The food there is fantastic quiality, very reasonably priced and the portions are huge. I have eaten at their restaurants in Islington, Finsbury Park and Chancery Lane and have had a fantastic meal each time.

However, there is the one that got away. Apparently two of the co-owners had an argument some years ago that led to the Muswell Hill restaurant breaking away from the rest. Since then, while my meals at other branches have only ever been pleasurable I've had two god awful experiences at the break away - both partially thanks to the harridan of a manageress.

First time my girlfriend got given a seafood dish with loads of bits of small sharp bits of shell in. "What do you expect?" the manageress said. "Shellfish has shells."

Second time we popped in with my girlfriend's sister and husband. All four pizzas came back with the crusts burnt to a crisp. Apparently we couldn't get them recooked as "The crusts aren't part of the pizza."

So, beware all you north Londoners. La Porchetta Muswell Hill may look like the others. It may even have the same menu. But no, it is in disguise.
(lost_jonson, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 8:09, Reply)

A catalogue of errors.
I wont divulge the name or location of the establishment as I'm told it has now changed hands and is very good, however....

My then girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to go out for a meal one Saturday night. Decked out in suitable finery, we booked at a local hotel's restaurant and set forth to enjoy a long boozy repast.

I had lubricated my desire for this with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and so was in a very relaxed mood when we arrived at the restaurant.

We were seated, gave the bored waitress our starter orders and then came the main course.
"I'd like roast potatoes with mine please" I piped up, emerging from my drunken stupour.
She informed me that they only had mashed.. I laughed "Are you serious?" For some reason we found this immensely funny. Imagining bags of potatoes out the back, some of them marked "Mashed".

Anyway we agreed, somewhat incredulously to have mashed potatoes and within a few minutes our starters arrived...
We were in the middle of these when the hopeless waitress bought out our main.
"Err, what are we supposed to do with these?"
She looked bemused. So did we.

At the other end of the restaurant some rowdy geordies were sat with who I later discovered was the owner.

Then as we were halfway through our main course the restaurant door opened and a South American pipe band walked in, and started playing. THEN the one whom I assume was the leader walked round the restaurant collecting money. I waved him off, I was still split between this being funny, and annoying. He waved his cap again, so I took out a tenner.
He tried to remonstrate but my grasp of the English language was better than his.
In the end the owner did her work for the evening and threw them out, then went back to being loud with the Geordies..

We finished, paid (no service charge.. I think I wrote "Are you kidding??" on the receipt) and waited in the rain for a taxi that never showed up..

We rang the cab company to ask where it was and they had sent him to Barclays Bank...
"Barclays Bank isnt open mate" I informed him before giving in to kismet and laughing till I micturated.

My wife and I still tell this story to this day, and I dont think even we can believe it.

No apologies for length, it was long, but I trust you gained something from it. ;-)
(LunarJim, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 7:59, Reply)

Weed in food!
Just to set the scene....my local bar is 2 blocks from my house (i.e. a 3 minute walk). They serve beer and wine only - no hard alcohol, and they don't do food. The place is full of regulars, and if you want to eat, you go to the pizza joint next door and they bring the food to you. They're also well known for being stoned and drunk on duty.

So, a few weeks ago I was starved and ordered garlic bread and a salad to be delivered to me - gave them a $2 tip (on a $8 order - a bit over the top, but you take care of them, they take care of you).
So, 50 minutes later, I'm wondering where my food is and go out for a smoke. I wander into the pizza place and ask where my food is. They tell me they're incredibly busy and haven't got around to it yet. At which point I'm like "guys, I order large pizzas with lots of sides from you and get it within 25 minutes, what's going on?"

The "supervisor" gets pissy with me and says if I was that hungry for my garlic bread and salad I'd have been in 40 minutes ago, and they proceed to make my garlic bread in front of me, and then make up the salad. While the guy is making the salad, I see him put his hand his pocket follwed by a sprinkling of cheese. Well, the garlic bread was awesome! And then I go for the salad.....on top of the cheese is some weed (pot, gange, whatever the terms are these days). The nearest I've been to that stuff in about 10 years is watching my friends smoke it, and my best friend who has terminal cancer is taking maranol (sp? some kind of marijuana pill for terminal patients).
I yell that there's weed on my food (bear in mind I dont'/cant' touch the stuff as it makes me sick), and the bar owner decides to call the cops.
So I'm sat there still hungry while the cops close the pizza joint down and I singlehandedly closed the bar for 3 days while the FBI did a sweep of the bar and other premises in the strip mall.

Surprisingly, I got 3 nights of free booze from the bar owner, who also owns the strip mal who had been dying to get the pizza joint shut down.
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 7:06, Reply)

My husband took me out for a meal to celebrate our anniversary.
It was Italian, my favourite, suitably vegetarian, delicious, beautifully served, with an excellent wine and a tempting dessert trolley.

What could be wrong with that?

Nothing, except that I'd been to the solicitor that very day to start separation proceedings.

I don't *think* he'd guessed.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 6:56, Reply)

Texas Roadhouse
My cousins flew thousands of miles to visit us in the states, and we all congregated on a Friday night at this cozy little steakhouse. All twelve of us. The waiter came to take our order, and to keep things simple we all ordered the same thing.

"Steak dinner for everyone, please."

"Sorry, due to the blizzard outside the beef truck didn't arrive."

"Oh...barbecued chicken then."

"The chicken was on the beef truck too."

"Fried fish?"

"It's not the season."

"Salads?"

"The blizzard knocked out the produce fridge."

"Well then, what DO you have?"

"Quite a lot, order anything you want!"

We ended up not eating there. I swear, it was just like the Monty Python cheese sketch.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 6:50, Reply)

I went to the old country once
and stopping at a nice eating-house for a lunch, I thought I'd have a good old schnitzel.

Not only did they not have any proper veal schnitzel (something about mad cows or some shit), but the drinks were overpriced.

Service and view was excellent.

4/5 stars
(riedacher_bertram, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 6:50, Reply)

Steak
I went to a steak place in London last time I was back in the UK, and the steak was lovely albeit 20 quid for each meal (without drinks). Now it's not the meat or the price that I'm objecting to, it was that they cocked up the drinks order. Twice.

20 quid meal, fine, but.. as an alcoholic I need a bloody beer or 3 to send it down... fortunately they weren't cheeky enough to try the old "service charge".

Oh! A friend of a friend (this is how all the good stories start) ate a shit sandwich once whilst drunk. Apparently he was always nicking stuff from this other guy's fridge so it was booby trapped with a couple of slices of hovis and a masterfully spread cleveland steamer.

And finally, another friend of mine cheated on his mrs while he was in Paris, with some 18 year old. He got the shits proper and only just made it home. Cue many, many references to "dodgy french sushi" in front of said mrs, and big STFU glares from him.

That's yer lot. Night!
(stoat on the road to nowhere, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 5:31, Reply)

Carbohydrate Plus!
I once went round to the boss of a girlfriend I used to have's house for dinner, as her boss wanted to introduce me to the boss' husband, to talk about the music industry.
Great.
So I go, and aside from said husband being talentless twat hippy, the meal served was potatoes, rice and pasta. No veg, no meat, the thinnest possible tomato sauce on the pasta, and some thin layer of shitty cheese on the taters. Rice as is.
What were they thinking? Cheap cnuts.
Got drunk regardless, but the girlfriend gorged herself on carbs and felt worse than me the day after.
(John Rooter, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 5:27, Reply)

We've all had a dodgy kebab...
...but this really takes the cake.

So we were all pissed & wandering around town at god knows what hour when the inevitable cravings begin and we all headed to the nearest kebab joint.

I decide to get the kebab on rice - just chicken on rice with tomato sauce thankyouverymuch.

Get outside and are about to tuck into it when - horror of horrors - I spy an enormous, curly black pube peeking out of the chicken at me.

I reeled back into the kebab joint loudly proclaiming that I'd found a pube in my food (at which point half the people queing walked out). The guy serving looked at me and said "well, it can't be from anyone who works here" (eh?!?!)

The evening then culminated in me pulling my pants down to reveal my freshly waxed nethers and yelling "well it sure as fuck didn't come from me"

I even got a round of applause. Woo.
(winestain, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 4:01, Reply)

In Budapest you gotta have guts...
Hungarian diner; not in the tourist part of town.
"Point-and-pray" menu.
Some old cnut, obviously a regular, toddles up and points out his favourite, indicates its deliciousness with much gibbering, lip-smacking noises and sign language.
Decide to trust his judgement.
Plateful of intestines.
(mudskipper, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 3:56, Reply)

Food poisoning woe
My family and my aunt's family went to a Japanese buffet type place. It all looked very good and tasted fine... until I made the bad decision to try the fish soup. Apparently it had not been cooked enough, at all. Soon I started feeling very ill. Then commenced the "Day of Vomiting" when I was subjected to endless Monty Python jokes. "Bring me my bucket" "the mint it is only wafer thin" my cousins said as I yarched into a trash can for a day. I was like a TARDIS full of puke. Not really a crap meal out since it left through another exit.

Edit: Remembered another one
Someone I know that shall remain nameless used to work at Burger King. A customer was being a total asshat when ordering a cheeseburger, so the manager told him he could give him a cheeseburger special. This consisted of placing the cheese slice between his buttcheeks and rubbing it like toilet paper. It was then placed on the burger and served to the customer. Whoever that customer was, they sure had a crappy meal.

Edit2: The Curse of the Hair
For about 5 years every single meal from a restaurant my sister went to had a hair concealed in the food. After the first few times she would look suspiciously at her food, check for hairs, and then take a bite, only to find a hair anyways. She must have pissed off a gypsy or something. It finally stopped though, and no it wasn't me or anyone she ate with that put them there. They just magically appeared. Could have been worse, at least they weren't curly.
(evil_penguin_17 Robots of Doom... Attack!, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 2:27, Reply)

Ants
When I was about 9 we went to Lanzerote. On our first day, we went down to the hotel dining room thingy, just a small seating area with buffet stylee food over the far side and then a till where you had to pay. We were standing in the buffet line, me and me mother and sister, when I look to the wall on my right, and there is a big big line of ants. How anyone before me didn't notice it, I do not know.

So I did what any other sensible 9 year old would do.

I threw french toast at it.

The little antsies went flying, it was like a scene from a Tom Hanks Hollywood war movie, little ants scattered by this missile of toast. Then one went in my sisters sandal, and she screamed the house down. She was only 4 at the time. This drew attention to the remaining, and wounded, ants. My mother looked embarrassed for my immaturity and bad behaviour, the other guests horrified of the line of ants next to their food, and the till lady pretending to be shocked, as if this 'type of thing' had never happened before!

After that, we had a box of cereal and plastic bowls in the hotel room for breakfast.

Ahh well, it was worth it I reckon.
(Hanargh, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 1:45, Reply)

Early turd special
We'd never been to what was supposedly the best joint in the area. Very expensive you see. But when my inlaws were visiting they noticed there was a reasonable fixed price,, early bird special if you came in between 6 and 7. They offered to treat so why not.

I won't go into the non-existent "service", etc. Here, however, are the dishes we enjoyed.

Mother-in-law: Roasted pork chop on a bed of fall vegetables. The roasting must have been done with a blowtorch, as the meat in question had an almost supernatural quality being dehydrated and burnt on the outside and nearly raw on the interior. This effect is diffucult to achieve in a chop apparently sliced with a laser to a generous centimeter or so of thickness. The "bed" of vegetables could be found under this delicacy, with a bit of looking about.

My wife: Shrimp with penne pasta in a cream sauce. Oh look, theres the shrimp. He looks thin. Probably he lost all that weight during the cooking process, which must have been lengthy. Too bad they used all the energy on the shrimp, as the pasta might have used cooking too....

Father in law: Steak. Ahh, a simple man. You'd think with a simple order like that all would be well. He did better than the rest of us I suppose, enjoying what may have been a full ounce of something that you could actually chew. I think there may have been a potato as well.

Myself: carpaccio. In this case, three dried out bits of flesh rolled in an entire box of salt, carefully arranged on a wilted lettuce leaf and smothered in a whole can of remaindered capers apparently tinned in the 1920's.

For some reason we passed on dessert.
(Ennui Kissinger, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 1:44, Reply)

Wagamama's in Camden
Went with my ex to try and smooth things over. As I got to the end of my yaki soba and the important part of "the talk", I realised I was starting to choke. In a panic I reached into my mouth and found something caught there, so I pulled on it - there was a really long straight jet black hair in my food which had wrapped itself around a noodle. A noodle which I had just swallowed and was now pulling back up my throat. It bounced into view and bobbed around on the end of the hair while, being an Englishman, I wondered if I should perhaps say something. Our waiter noticed me and came over immediately, offering me another dish but as I only had a forkful left, I wasn't really bothered, so they took the yaki soba off the bill for me.

The only thing we couldn't work out was where it had come from - at the time my hair was short and brown, as was the waiter's, and my ex's was (naturally) blonde. We could see into the open kitchen and all of the chefs working that night were black guys with very short curly hair or a shaved head, so there wasn't a single person in the chain from kitchen to table who could have shed the hair into my food.

I've been back. It's usually pretty good, though I once paid at the counter and stormed off without leaving a tip because I ordered a fruit juice as my meal arrived and an hour later I was looking at my empty plate, still thirsty.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 1:09, Reply)

this only hapened last week
i enjoy my food. Well, when it lets me, anyway. Stand up and be shamed, the Perdiswell pub in Worcester. Since it was my wife's birthday, and we had her friends round, and a total of five children to contend with, we thought we'd go there. it has a Wacky Warehouse thing attached, so when the kids have eaten they can piss off and wear themselves out while the grownups set to the main course and talk of the deeds of the day, or some such. Anyway, to reduce the staff workload I had to fill in an order form for what we wanted for dinner, a bit like Argos. i'd asked the desk muppet to serve the kids' dinners with the starters, so that they wouldn't get bored. Easy? You'd think so. the starters were horrid (barbecue chicken? turkey twizzlers and a macdonalds style pack of sauce) and the kids remained unfed. Complaints came to nothing, more a sort of "sorry, didn't get that" approach. The main course was something else. I'd ordered a lamb balti. it came in a small dish with rice. In the dish was a red fluid with green bits. i fished around with a fork and recovered four solid components, three fo which were mutton and one of which was gristle, species unknown. The residual red fluid was tinned tomatoes and pepper. This does not a lamb balti make. I ate it, just to stop myself feeling hungry (not enjoyable, but I realised it could be metabolised, so down it went). A naan bread came with it, i picked it up and realised it was four or five days old and could be used to bang loudly on the table. By now the kids have missed their chance to get intoo the wacky warehouse and several have got the wrong dinners, and are going mental. I'm disgusted, and i wrote on the naan "A bit hard for my liking. 0/10, must try harder". It came back in the hands of the manager who said "Look, I don't know who wrote this, but if there was anything wrong with the meal you could just have told me" then he left without waiting for a reply, the lying monkey. Well, i refuse to apologise. Anyone who serves me a naan bread that i can write on using a pencil deserves all the spite i can summon. And while you're at it, keep your gristle in tinned tomatoes and your miserable turkey twizzlers. And if you'd rather we complained, we'd been complaining all night and nothing got done. I hope you get sacked.

On the bright side, I'd like to plug my favourite two eateries. Floodgates, Left Bank Village, Hereford. Excellent, amazing food. And for the other end of the day, Rations cafe, southern avenue industrial estate, leominster, for the best fried breakfast in the free world. Black pudding, yum.

Apologies for length, but it wanted some air round it.
(Jack Rarebit ...We like chillies, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 1:08, Reply)

lack of service
I remember being on a cathay pacific flight somewhere between Australia and England. It took me over a whole hour and several requests to just get a damn CAN of Coke! I mean c'mon, at the time barely anyone else was making requests for food/drinks and there were plenty of hostesses about. all I wanted was for someone to duck over to the fridge to grab a can for me!
(Mad_Nashy WHEEEEEE!, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 1:01, Reply)

A near miss
Whilst in Tenerife me and a few family members found what looked like a nice outdoor restaurant/bar type of place. We got a drink and decided whether to eat there or not and our decision was made when we saw the 'chef' (by chef I mean greasy, incredibly drunk old Spaniard bloke) cooking a steak with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth thoughtfully dribbling on the meat and tapping his fag ash on it as he cooked it. Delightful but it wasn't for us.
(chakaflange, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 0:48, Reply)

A Restaurant Called "Food" in Manchester....
Slowest service I've ever experienced.

Soft drinks cost more than the alcoholic ones.

The ultimate insult was having waited for ages to order, for the food to come, and then having had to ask for the bill several times and FINALLY received it, the waitress pointed out loudly that "service is not included"

The only answer possible was, just as loudly, "Yes, we noticed."

It is rare that I leave an "insult" tip, but on this occasion they had really earned the £0.02 which I left.

Oh, they went bust shortly after. Good.
(rob3rt, Thu 27 Apr 2006, 23:43, Reply)