Don't Look Down on Us

So today my friends took me out for dinner this evening as a birthday gift and it was excellent, well, mostly. So the food was amazing, we ended up not going to the Brazilian Barbecue place but instead a Middle Eastern Restaurant called Lebanese Taverna. It's a really nicely decorated place, like Ancient Arabia meets New York sheik and since we reserved a table we got to sit down right away.

So the good part - the food was amazing, I ordered something called Ouzi which apart from being very fun to say was a delight for my taste buds. It's a lamb and rice dish with plenty of spices, almonds and a tangy yogurt sauce. The appetizers we ordered were also good and we might have found a new most addicting food in the form of their fresh made flat bread which was crispy on the outside and hot and steamy on the inside. Dessert finally also was a good and because we went for my birthday, instead of getting cake, we got birthday baklava and honey ice cream, yay! haha. So the food part of the dinner was great, flavourful, fresh and refreshingly unique and innovative.

Now the bad part - If you go to any restaurant you expect to be treated well- courteously and with respect- this is no problem if you are an adult but if you're a group of teenagers, not so much. I'll be blunt, our waiter was rude, inattentive and looked down on us the whole time he waited on us. The first thing we asked for, separate checks, he flatly said no to saying instead "No, I'm going to bring one check and you guys just pay each of your own parts" giving us a disapproving look after. So then came time to order, by now he was getting impatient with us because we had originally sent him back twice because we needed more time so things didn't get better. When my friend ordered a lamb kebab dish, he asked how she wanted it done, he said "medium", my friend does not really like her red meat red so she said medium well which he promptly responded with a shocked/disapproving look, making a face as he wrote it down. Now, while we ate our appetizers we quickly finished our addicting bread and three of us ran through our glasses of water, he never once checked in on us while the table he waited one table over was checked on literally ever 3 minutes. By the end of the meal we paid for dinner, Maria paid for my portion as a gift while the others paid on their own, two with cards and one with cash. Now on the check, there was a section labeled "suggested tip" which was about $20 or so dollars which the waiter had circled, (wtf?) So I guess you can expect that afterwards when we got the receipt sans the change for my friend who paid in cash she was supposed to receive, we had all reached the last straw. We ended up filling out the comment card in the bill and gave it to the maitre d' at the front detailing our experience and we didn't provide any additional tip apart from the money he failed to return to us.

Some of us felt somewhat guilty afterwards but we all agreed that the way we were treated was completely unacceptable. We felt belittled, looked down upon, and discriminated against just because we were a group of teenagers rather than adults. Sure the food was excellent, but any dining experience consists of two parts, the food and the experience, yes, the food was fantastic, but the experience left much to be desired.

Anyone else had a similar experience at a restaurant or any store in general?