Cypriot diners complain. First of all they complain that there are no decent restaurants to go to. Then they complain that when they do venture out, the service they receive is non-existent or rude. The final complaint is inevitably the inexplicably extortionate bill.
But waiters have their own woes too. The Sunday Mail spoke to at least a dozen waiters who each had a different story to tell. Some stories were almost too unbelievable to be true.
One of the funniest came from Maria Ioannou.
“I used to work at a Chinese restaurant. This couple came in one night and the man demanded that we bring him bread. When I explained that we didn’t have bread because we were a Chinese restaurant he became very agitated and said he couldn’t possibly eat without bread. I told him I was sorry but there was nothing I could do. The next week he and his wife came in again. This time he brought his own loaf with him. It was still in the bakery bag and I thought for a minute it was a joke until I saw him soaking up the black bean sauce with it,” she said.
Marios Petrou said very often customers didn’t know what they were ordering, but just pretended to be connoisseurs.
“They’ll ask for [Johnny Walker] Black Label and then when you take it to them they’ll insist it’s not Black Label. I’ve actually had to bring them the bottle to show them. Other times they’ve ordered wine and insist it’s off because the particular wine they’ve chosen is too dry for their taste. I’ll always try it and if it is off, I’ll change it. But it drives me mad when they’ve just ordered without knowing and then decide they don’t like it,” he said.
Insisting wine wasn’t chilled at the proper temperature and demanding ice was also a common phenomenon, another waiter said.
But an unusual one involved a complaint that a bottle of red wine was too cold, according to John Mattheos.
“The customer insisted I put it in the microwave. I looked at him and explained it would ruin the wine. He said he was the customer and since he was paying I was to do as he asked, so I did. When I took him the wine he said it was undrinkable and told me to take it away. He ended up ordering a soft drink instead. The wine was ruined and I had to throw it out because how could I offer it to someone else after it had been microwaved?”
Another waitress said she’d had to change a woman’s salad four times.
“She’d order one, add the dressing, take one look at it and say she’d changed her mind. She then ordered another one and did the same. She did this four times. She finally settled on a seafood salad,” she said.
It goes without saying that the customer only paid for the last salad.
“It was obvious she just wanted see what the salads looked like as she couldn’t make up her mind from the menu,” she said.
A second waitress in the same restaurant said she’d had an experience where a woman ordered chicken and rice and that when it arrived she took one look at it and said she’d ordered salmon.
“I know I didn’t make a mistake taking her order but she was adamant. She then started to accuse me of calling her a liar. I apologised, took it back to the kitchen and brought her salmon,” she said.
Ioanna Michaelidou said she knew a male customer who would only accept his orders being taken from one of the male waiters.
“One day the waiter was off and it was just four girls in. I went over to take his order and he looked at me and said ‘I’m not letting you take my order’. It was said with such revulsion that I just backed away. He wouldn’t let any of the girls take his order so he finally left without eating anything,” she said.
Some customers sent back ice-cream if they were served three scoops instead of two. Others demanded that the froth from fresh apple juice be removed before they were served. And others took their own bottle of whisky hidden in a bag to top up their glass after ordering their first drink.
Clicking fingers, shouting out, and banging forks on glasses to get a waiter’s attention were also common. Tapping a waiter on the shoulder and insisting he turn to speak to a customer when he was taking someone else’s order had also happened. As had calling Asian waiters ‘black man’ and pressing phone numbers on and harassing female staff.
“I want to eat and I want to eat now, is probably the most often heard demand I get. You get the odd customer who will not listen to you when you try and explain that the restaurant is full and could they give you five minutes for a table to clear,” Pavlos Athanasiou said.
“It’s almost as if they think you’re trying to snub them and the next thing you know they start raising their voice and asking for a manager. When you say you are the manager they might look at you like you’ve grown two heads and just walk out.”
Andreas Artemiou said he found the worst customers were the nouveau riche.
“They think just because they have €10 in their pocket they own the place. You should see the dismissive looks you get from some if you say hello,” he said.
He recalled an incident when a young woman had asked a colleague for a coffee.
“I remember she asked him what coffee we had as she rapped her fingers on the counter irritably. He told her we had filter coffee or instant coffee. She asked him if we did a macchiato [an espresso with a dash of warm or cold milk]. When he stared at her blankly, she got really uptight and said, ‘do you even know what a macchiato is? How can you not know what a macchiato is?’ The poor guy looked really confused and close to tears. She made him feel really small and I had to intervene and tell her if she wanted a macchiato she should go to Starbucks.”
Savvas Savva said he couldn’t stand the type of customer he said belonged to the ‘brat set’ either.
“They are spoilt and ill-mannered and think that they can do whatever they want. One night I remember we were really packed. The place was literally heaving and all of us were working flat out. Suddenly the phone rings and this voice tells me that table 50 is ready to order. I couldn’t believe it. They had only just been seated and decided that they were not going to wait their turn like everyone else,” he said.
If it had been up to him, Savva said he’d have asked them to leave. Instead he’d had to bite his tongue and take the 20-something-year-olds’ order.
Nevertheless, despite their war stories, all the waiters and restaurateurs questioned said that on the whole Cypriot customers did know how to behave.
“It’s actually up to the establishment to set the standard. If you make it clear from the get go that you won’t put up with certain things and you treat them with respect, then they will treat you back with respect. You’ll always get that two to three per cent of the population that is rude, but you get that anywhere. It comes with the job,” Markos Petrou said.
