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Customers can't read a "closed" sign, or call ahead ...

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Several years ago, I worked as a host at a very popular, but small seafood restaurant on the southern Oregon coast At max capacity, we could fit just over 75 guests. To make things worse, this place also had a shop for souvenirs and both smoked and fresh seafood. (They had cannery and a huge smoker behind the restaurant.) This tiny restaurant had been featured on one of the national morning news shows, and was rated as having the best canned albacore tuna in the country. We got very busy every night. Because of how busy we got, we would take reservations up to a point, but leave some tables open for walk-ins. With my previous six years as a host, they put me in charge of deciding if we had room for reservations or not. Basically, I became the maitre d for a tiny restaurant. Still the same pay of course. One day, on what was actually one of our quieter nights, we had two large groups of guests taking the only space we had for large groups. A motorcycle club shows up out of nowhere, about 20 of them. I politely told them that the only place available for that size group wouldn't be available for close to an hour, and would they like to make a reservation for that time, as we did have a table available then. They immediately went back to the bikes, and before leaving, they all revved their engines for about 30 seconds. It was summer time, so we had the windows open for fresh air. When they finally left, it took close to ten minutes for the exhaust to clear. Another thing that happened quite often, we closed at 10:00pm on most nights. We turned the open signs off, or turned them to closed, depending on the sign. We didn't have the doors that could be locked to prevent from coming in, and still allow our guests to leave when they were done. With an average wait time of 45 minutes on a busy night, we would be saying bye to our last customers close to midnight. We allowed anyone had gotten in before we closed to stay, if they wanted to. The food was really good, so they waited. One night, about half an hour after we were officially closed, we had the wait list down to just a few parties, but the restaurant was still packed with guests. I'm cleaning a table to get it ready for the next guest on the list, when I see a couple walk into our side entrance, right past a 15 ft X 15 ft sign in the window that says "Sorry, we're closed". Before I could get over to the register where we kept the wait list, I saw the guy just grab a pen and put his name on it. What sane human being could ever do that?

March 1, 2012

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