Ask the Agony Uncle: How to deal with a rude restaurant friend

Do you have a friend who likes to send back perfectly good meals and takes joy in seeing waitstaff reduced to tears? Darren Levin knows just the type, and how to manage them.

• How do you tell a touchy feely friend to back off?
• Ask Agony Uncle: How do I beat my neighbour’s double standard?

Dear Darren,

I love my friend dearly. But something happens when she’s in a restaurant setting and she turns into a rude and demanding monster. One time she made a waiter cry by sending a perfectly good meal back three times. I’ve started blowing off her dinner plans but she knows something is up.

Simone, 53

Being rude to wait staff is risky business. Picture: iStock

Dear Simone,

I live in Victoria, so please give me a moment to recalibrate my brain back to that two-week window when we could sit down at a restaurant for a meal (providing, of course, we entered all our details via QR code, sanitised ourselves thoroughly, and ate from a restricted menu for a set period of time no more than 60 minutes.) Oh yes, the good old days! Back in the before times, when Melbourne was a city with a night-life that stayed up longer than my six-year-old twins.

Being nice to wait staff is part of an unspoken dining code that also includes ordering your steak medium rare, never asking to split the bill, or requesting Frankenstein dishes from two distinct menu items. “Can I have the braised lamb but with the orange sauce from the duck confit?” No, you absolutely cannot.

I hate to be blunt, but your friend sounds like a Restaurant Karen. Is she always asking for the manager?

Diagnosis complete.

There are entire online threads dedicated to the creative and very devious ways hospo workers get their revenge on rude customers – from kicking out their chairs to surreptitiously smearing butter on their jackets.

Darren Levin has discovered the restaurant Karen. Picture: Jay Town

It may sound extreme, but the only way to stop a Karen in their tracks is to pull out your phone and publicly shame them.

So the next time your friend returns a steak to the kitchen for the third time, or thrashes a waiter for the crime of neglecting to put ice in the water, just whip out your pocket shaming device and film the interaction.

If that sounds a bit drastic, you could always remind them of that famous proverb: woman who is rude to waiter ends up with gastro the next day.