Ever find yourself wanting a nice, quiet dinner at your favorite restaurant? Maybe this is your one chance a week or month to get out and treat yourself and your family to a nice dinner that you don’t have cook or clean up yourself. You know exactly where you want to go and have been looking forward to it all week. You’ve already decided on that pasta dish you had the last time you were there. Or it could just be a juicy chicken sandwich with all of the fixings with a side of fries and a beer to ease yourself into the weekend. It’s a time to unwind and let someone else do all of the work.
You show up and the hostess is going to seat you at your favorite table booth in the back that you requested upon arrival. The lights are dim. All you hear is the low hum of people in deep conversation and the occasional glass tapping the corner of a plate. Then, all of the sudden, a child screams from the direction you are walking. You attention goes directly to the sound to see a family of four having their dinner right beside your favorite table. You procede to your table with uneasiness and anxiety. You stop your hostess and quickly ask for another table. Unfortunately, there are no more tables left, leaving your favorite the only option. You go ahead and sit down hoping the four top next to you is almost done eating and will be gone shortly. You look over and see two beers and two red colored drinks in small cups. Nothing else on the table. No empty plates, no mess, no check… Looks like they are here for a while.
You do notice that the noise has stopped the low hum of the restaurant is back. Back to my relaxing dinner with my family. You begin a conversation about whatever when all of the sudden the younger child begins whining. The whining grows into a sobbing and then comes another loud scream. You look up and see that the parents aren’t doing a thing to have this child shut up. The parents are desensitized to these horrible sounds coming out of this child’s mouth. Finally, after a few minutes of yelling, a parent finally grabs the child and puts it into the floor to run freely and to become obnoxious in a whole new way. Now this child is getting in the way of the servers which are trying to work. Also climbing under tables and going up to complete stranger’s tables to just being plain annoying.
I could go on forever about parents that do not watch their children and the fact that children do not have a lick of discipline these days. These children rule the roost and the parents just let them have their way in order to have the little angels shut up and leave them alone.
I remember one time being at a restaurant in Little Rock and listening to a child kick a wall while laying down in the booth. The bottom’s of his shoes just pounding the wall like a drum. Finally, some other guy stood up from a near-by table and yelled at them to shut the kid up which was very nice to see. But minutes later, the child was kicking the wall with his bare feet. His dad actually took his shoes off so his little angel could continue kicking the wall without being as annoying to those around them. Wow! Great parenting!
The morel of my story is please teach your children how to act in public and especially at restaurants. The rest of us did not go eat out to get a show from your darling. And oh yea, how about when your child or children leave a gigantic mess on the table and the floor, that you leave the server a little more tip for taking the extra out of earing a wage and cleaning up that impossible mess.
Is this just me or do we have a growing problem with obnoxious children in restaurants?
When you confront rude parents in restaurants, be prepared for a major confrontation. I was eating in the back table of my favorite restaurant in the Silicon Valley enjoying a good glass of wine and reading book. This booth was tucked away in a corner near the window. Along came a 3 or 4-year-old child, running around, screaming and managing to climbing under my table. Looking out, I noticed a woman in her mid-thirties with an older woman, presumably her mother. She was watching the whole thing from across the room, and they seemed to be getting a kick out of the whole thing. Well, I’ll tell you, I was seeing red.
“Lady, you’re kid!”, I said to her in a serious tone.
She came over had started to give me the third-degree, “How dare you, this and that”. Responded to this crap, I didn’t mix words and said something like, “You’re letting you kid run wild in here!”, and told her to leave my table. The woman stomped off and went to the manager, Ramon, who knows me. They came back to my table and she noticed some wine. She pointed this out to Ramon and accused me of being belligerent. The older lady came up and demanded that if I wasn’t removed from the restaurant, they would never return. If that was her mother, this narcissistic conduct was beginning to make some sense.
“He comes in here all the time. He was just minding his own business”, Ramon told her, trying to calm her down.
“Well, I never…”, she said, mentioning something about her large income at a Valley company, as this was reason for us to be forced to endure her toddler’s unruly behavior. When she couldn’t get me thrown out, mother, daughter and child left, never to be seen back there again. Good riddance!
Later, Ramon apologized, but said he had to handle her delicately to keep his job, as he was trying to tell her to control her kid. “O course, I understood, but told him that I told him that I didn‘t have to.
Hopefully, future restaurant patrons they chooses to dine will be spared the grief we had to put up with.
Comment by Fed up rude parents — August 6, 2008 @ 9:04 pm