Sending food back, what about the rest of the diners?

Question

Today, I sent back a meal because it wasn't prepared correctly. As the server took the meal back, I was talking to my wife about her meal. It dawned on me that everytime I send a meal back, it ruins my restaurant experiance. My wife ends up eating alone while I talk to her, or she eats a cold meal while she waits for my meal to come back. Once my meal comes, I end up eating really fast becasue she is already done with hers, or I don't want hers to get any colder. Either way, the experiance is shot. 

I was wondering how obnoxious it would be for me to send both meals back, mine and hers, and tell the restaurant to bring them both back correctly at the same time? Does anyone do this, and what response have you received?

Answer

I would never, it's just a meal, plenty more to come.

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I wouldn't take that chance .

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Let me ask this: What if it was a table of 4, 10, 20? When you send food back and it gets remade the kitchen gets backed up slightly. The backing up interrupts the flow of service and causes delays for other customers.

Now, I am not against sending food back if there are real concerning issues with it but to have the whole table remade because of one possible mistake is going a bit far. The restaurant will probably comp your dish anyways because it got sent back so it's already losing money for two sets of prep for the bad plate and the cost of charging you nothing for a mistake; to punish the restaurant (and by extension the rest of the customers) so severely by remaking the entire table's food is ridiculous.

Very few restaurants can absorb the delay of re-firing a whole table, and it will probably be put back into the back of the firing queue anyways. Would you feel comfortable making everybody at your table wait an additional 20 minutes just because you had problems with your food? Either way, somebody at your table will be discomfited.

Customers don't need to know how a restaurant works, but apply a little logic and you can see how silly it gets.

Answer

As far as your "everytime I send a meal back," how often does that happen? I eat out a lot and I can count the amount of times I've sent anything back in the last decade on one hand (with fingers left over. Some kitchen sins are unforgivable but most can be overlooked. How often do you send meals back?

Answer

It sounds like you send meals back with some degree of frequency.
"...it ruins MY restaurant experience"
Really? How about your poor wife who has HER meal shit upon because you insist that your meal be re-fired?
From my standpoint, it's worse to be the one left with food in front of them, eating slowly, or watching it go cold in front of your very eyes because you feel bad eating and enjoying.
Look, sending the meal back is a clusterf*ck any way you slice it.

Your wife sounds like a saint, eating a cold meal every time you pull this. I couldn't abide watching my DH's meal experience go south while he sits there, hungry, watching perfectly good food get cold.
I couldn't do that to him unless there was something really wrong going on with my meal.
I love him to much and put his happiness first and foremost. He loves dining out and we don't get to do it that often.
What a pity for your wife!

Perhaps you can suck it up, barring any health concerns, so that the meal isn't ruined, and once you send that meal back, it's in the toilet.
Period.

Oh, not for nothing, but you've inconvenienced who knows how many diners because your meal is being made, again, instead of theirs.

I can't even bring myself to entertain the notion that a perfectly good meal get re-fired or sit under a heat lamp because you insist upon getting another meal done.

Answer

In some 40 years of eating out with some regularity, I can only recall four occasions when one of us has sent something back. Those occasions have been when something has been very wrong and the food pretty much inedible. As the OP points out, sending food back ruins the enjoyment of the evening which is why I am more than happy to put with the occasional less than stellar plate of food. We go out primarily to enjoy each others company. 

On those four occasions, it has never occured to me to even consider that the other, entirely acceptable plate should also be returned. I think a restaurant would be well within its space to decline to do this and, if pressed by the customer, to ask them to leave. The customer is not always right and more places need to see that more customers realise that.

Answer

That is a reasonable request and not difficult for a restaurant to accommodate, in fact at a good, white tablecloth restaurant the server should ask the companion diners "would you like me to keep your meal warm in the kitchen while we fix our error"? Now this is impractical for a large table but for two or four diners it should be de rigueur. At the French restaurants where I worked, this was a commonplace occurrence.

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Sending a truly incorrect/wrong dish is fine. Sending back a proper dish is not fine under any circumstances.

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I have sent back meals of several occasions. My feeling is that I order a dish a certain way and I expect to receive the dish as ordered. Why ask about your desired doneness of a steak if that is not what the kitchen is committed to delivering? Why eat a $25 overcooked piece of salmon? If I buy a blue item and when i open the box it is red, I return it, a restaurant needs to abide by the same standards.

When I am out with my wife and one of our dishes is served wrong, the person eating takes their time and we have conversation. When the corrected dish reappears person #2 does likewise. We normally have a little share on the bread plate on both dishes as well. We learned to make the best of it. 

I would love it if the restaurant would re-fire both if it is just the two of us, but that is unrealistic, more likely they will keep one under the heat lamp, continuing the cooking process and then it is just a game of ping pong on which is not up to the correct standards.

Larger groups, each person makes the call, and it happens as well. The group barely notices since there is so much conversation going on that it is rare that the person waiting delays the entire table more than 10 minutes.

As far as the other diners in the restaurant, not my problem. The restaurant created the situation, it needs to fix it and work through the issues at any other table.

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The kitchen could keep your wife's meal under the warmer with little loss in quality while yours is prepared. If her meal includes something that doesn't hold well, like eggs, the chef would probably redo them. I wouldn't expect the kitchen to prepare a whole new meal for her.

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If it's an allergy issue, then I'm all about sending back food that might kill someone. Other than that, I'm with many others here when I read "...every time I send back a meal...". As someone who eats out at least a dozen times a week at all price points I really can't remember the last time I sent something back. Sometimes things are not cooked precisely as ordered. Sometimes I haven't really liked what I ordered, often because I try new things. I'll make note of what I liked or didn't but for me to send back something it would have to be inedible. I'm much more forgiving in moderate to low price point places as I don't have the same expectations from the 17 year old line cook as I do the cooks at higher end places.
Finally, I come back to the title of the thread "Sending food back, what about the rest of the dinners?" I think as the OP, this is the question you should be asking yourself when contemplating sending a meal back. Is the error so egregious that I'm willing to ruin the dining experience of my fellow dinners? I've eaten a lot of bad meals in my day. I'm much more likely not to return than send something back especially if I'm dining with others. Maybe that's just me.

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Answer: Extremely obnoxious.
Next?

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Chef Douglas Hewitt says - - and I agree - - that the whole table should cleared and they should start over. No muss - no fuss. This is a dining experience that you are paying for and you are not some laborer grabbing a sandwich out of a lunch pail. If the waiter takes it personally or the kitchen can't see why they messed up, then pull the parachute and bail on the place right away - never return.

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Sending food back, what about the rest of the diners?

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