I've been a dishwasher for 2.5 years at a high end restaurant and I've learned some secrets on how to get treated better at nice restaurants by being a good customer

1. If your server is busy, and the food runners or bussers are walking by, you can flag them down to ask for more water or bread or whatever and they'll get it for you. The servers don't like you doing this, so they'll come to check on you more to get you to stop, improving your service.<br><br>2. Tipping the bussers is a good way of getting extra complimentary things like extra bread, or sometimes even a free dessert. There's usually 1 busser for every 3-4 servers, so its easy to figure out who they are, it's the person clearing the table that's not the server or runner. They usually won't say anything to you about accepting tips, they'll just accept them, but I've had other bussers tell me when a table tried to give them a tip that they can't accept it, and so the table gives it to the server instead. <br><br>3. If you are polite to the food runners, they'll "accidentally" give you extra of certain things in your meals. For example, if you're eating fried chicken and you're nice to the runners, instead of 3 pieces of chicken with 3 biscuits, they'll give you 5-6 pieces of chicken with 4-5 biscuits and maybe even an extra side.<br><br>4. If you're eating at a steak house and ask for a wine recommendation, the server will always recommend a more expensive wine since they make more commission on it. If you ask a busser or runner for a recommendation, they'll tell you which of the cheaper wines are actually good so you can save a little money on alcohol.<br><br>5. Tipping on take out.<br>I don't know if this is just a thing for the restaurant I work at, but when we see tips on take out orders, we give those orders priority over the ones without tips.<br>For example, if I'm really backed up and there are 12 take out orders to be dishwasher, 3 of them have tips and 9 of them don't, I'll do the 3 with tips first and then do the 9 without. If we see a tip on an order, we assume that that order is for a regular customer that we want to keep happy, so we make sure those orders get priority over people who aren't tipping. <br>It's not that we purposely do anything bad to orders without tips, it's just that orders with tips get a bit of extra attention and care.<br><br>6. A lot of restaurants add gratuity to large tables because they know that Americans don't know how to tip and would get a lot of 0% tips if they didn't add in gratuity for larger tables.<br>Sometimes people will leave an additional tip on top of the gratuity since they don't check to see that gratuity has already been added.<br>If you had a large table, make sure to check your bill to see if gratuity has already been added so you're not accidentally leaving a 25-30% tip<br><br>7. If we see that a customer is in a hurry, we rush the food out. If we see that a customer is in no rush, we slow down the food so that you can be seated at a table for a longer period of time and we can turn your table over faster.<br>If you want your food faster, look at your phone or talk quickly and urgently to the people you're with and we'll get your food out faster. If you want your food slower, sit back in your chair and talk at a normal pace.<br><br>8. There's usually some sort of deal where if the food takes too long to get out, it's free.<br>At my restaurant, if the food takes over 16 minutes to get out of the kitchen after the order is put in, the server can mark it as a "Miss" and the food is free.<br>If you see your server arguing with the expeditor, they're arguing over whether or not your food is a miss or not.<br>It's not really worth the servers time to argue too much since he'll only get a $0.50 credit for himself if he wins, but it's worth asking about since you might get your meal free.<br><br>9. a. If your server is back of house while you're waiting for your food, they're probably complaining to the kitchen that your food is taking too long and trying to get it marked as a miss for you so that it's free.<br><br>9. b. If your server is back of house while you're waiting for your food, they're probably delaying your food so that it doesn't get out too quickly, so that they can avoid having it marked as a miss and getting the discount for you.<br><br>10. If you're a good customer, the staff will give you things when you'm not looking.<br>For example, if you order a charcuterie, the server might "forget" to charge you for some of the extras. Or if you ask for some sauce, the runner might "forget" to take your credit card to pay for it when they pick up the empty sauce container. Or the server might "accidentally" give you a free dessert when you've completed paying and are about to leave.<br>We didn't always do this, but ever since COVID, we've been trying to give out a little extra to customers because we feel bad that prices have gone up so much.<br>Since prices have gone up, tips have gone down, so we're trying to make up for it in other ways.<br><br>11. If you're eating at a chain restaurant and the workers are being rude, lazy, and providing bad service, it's usually because the chain is in the process of closing the location and the workers know they're all about to lose their jobs.<br><br>12. If you call in an order for pick up and ask if the order is ready yet, the staff will start rushing to get the order ready so it's ready by the time you arrive.<br>But if you don't call to check on the order and just show up at the stated ready time, the staff will see that you're there and start working on the order.<br>So if you call and ask if the order is ready and the staff say that it's not, it's actually ready already and they're just trying to get you to hang up so they can stop rushing to get it ready.<br>Obviously this isn't true for every restaurant, but I've seen this happen enough that I think it's pretty common