philblog

An injera-ious experience

So Laura and I spent the day at the National Zoo last week Thursday. Afterwards, we agreed to meet two others at an Ethiopian restauarant. Ethiopian food consists of a casserole type dish that you scoop up with pieces of a spongy, sourdough-like pancake, called injera. Laura and I were both a bit wary of the whole experience, rightly so, as it turned out; the food tasted every bit as bad as it looked. But you don't write a weblog entry about bad food; you write one about the service.

Our Frommer's guide suggested that when eating at "possibly the best Ethiopian restaurant in Washington, D.C....split an entree". So Laura and I asked the waitress if we could order an entree and an appetizer to share, to which she unapologetically and curtly pointed towards some small print in the menu that said something like, "Due to our generous portions and low prices, we ask that customers each order their own entree". (Oddly enough, the portions turned out to be NOT terribly generous and the prices were quite HIGH). Since we were with other people, Laura and I both figured it would be rude to get up and leave at that point, so we bit the bullet, took the hit on the wallet and each ordered our own entree.

Our waitress had meanwhile brought out our waters right away and returned to refill them within about a minute, never to return again with water. What she did return with, meanwhile, was a bad attitude. *zing!* She was rude, curt, and basically unwilling to be a waitress. So out came our high-priced, small amount of poor tasting food that almost made Laura sick. The mean old waitress brought out our bill after unpolitely refusing to split it into two parts for us, citing restaurant policy, again with nothing close to an apology. So I told the guy who ended up paying that I'd pay him back, but I told him to leave an amount for a tip for Laura and me equalling about 12% or so, which I felt was quite generous, considering.

The guy who paid decided to leave a similar sized tip and wrote the tip amount on his receipt. The waitress walked up to our table, stopped and looked directly at the receipt IN OUR PRESENCE, and proceeded to tell us that we had to tip at least 15%, citing, you guessed it, restaurant policy. I told her, "No, the tip is our discretion". She replied, "Well, what was wrong with my service?", to which I had to awkwardly spell out for her why I felt she deserved 3% less of a tip than normal (We're talking less than a dollar here). So she walked away, and we left the tip as is, though I now regret having left a tip at all, and walked out. I was fuming for the rest of the night, needless to say.

Would you have left a tip?