How to get kicked out of a restaurant

It's been a couple months since we were basically kicked out of an Italian restaurant and told never to return. But the reason that I am reminded of this event is because this restaurant has shut down, recently having been replaced by a Chinese place.

Now, how did we ever find ourselves in such a predicament? I mean, it's not every day that someone gets kicked out of a restaurant. Getting kicked out of a club is much more common, but that's the topic of another story. I can assure you though that it had nothing to do with me.


It was two friends of mine's birthday and we decided of all places to go to an Italian restaurant on Kingsway. We had made a reservation for nine, but one person couldn't make it. The restaurant owner/cook came over and said we had to have set menus because we now had eight people. Confused and unrelenting, we demanded that we order off the menu. He conceded to our demand but was unhappy.

Then the server came over and we ordered. One person asked him to confirm that the spinach dish he wanted was vegetarian friendly. We also gave him a cake to put in the fridge.  I wasn't really looking forward to this dinner. Online reviews said that this place was nice, small, and cozy. I, however, found the atmosphere to be dark, cramped, and foreboding. The plan for me was to eat quickly and boot it out of there.

40 minutes later and our food still hadn't arrived. We started talking about the sluggish service and about how the food wasn't even that great. One of our friends said he wasn't feeling well because he was too hungry. He left saying that he was going to get some pizza, but he never returned. What a lucky soul. He wouldn't want to see what was to come.

A very small portion of pasta. Note: baseball is for scale and was not present in the actual dish.

When the food finally came, we noticed some peculiarities. The guy who wanted to confirm that his dish had no meat whatsoever had a very small serving. The reason that people liked coming to this place was because of the large servings (not because of the tastiness). But seriously, his dish was small. Another of my friends had a hair in her dish and even still another had very little sauce. It was like the chef ran out of sauce and had to scrape out every last drop of tomato sauce from the can and still didn't have enough. It was horrible. We didn't even bother complaining because we had already been waiting for an hour and couldn't afford to wait any longer for fixes.

Finally, the server came out with the cake, lit with 22 individual candles. Note: at this time the restaurant was empty except for us. We carried out the logistics of a birthday and started eating the cake. After that, we continued to socialize for perhaps five minutes.

The server came out with the bill--hang on--don't we normally ask for the bill instead of being handed one. It was as they wanted to kick us out. We looked at the bill and it appeared that they charged us a $2/person cake fee. We asked the server what the meaning of this was because we were not told this to begin with. Plus, some of us had come here many times with cakes and hadn't been charged such a fee. We asked our server (the only server in the restaurant) to ask the chef/owner in the kitchen to remove this.

Moments later, a broad shouldered, thick eye-browed man stormed to our table. One of us asked him about the cake fee. He said in a snaring voice that all restaurants charge a cake fee of which they are not obliged to inform the guests. He also said that the fee goes towards lighting and putting each of the 22 candles onto the cake (ok so this may have been my fault because I personally bought those candles owing to the fact that I couldn't find numbered candles at the dollar store).

One of us said that she was going to call her lawyer. This was when he got really mad. He yelled with flaring nostrils, "Get out of my restaurant." (Note: this wouldn't have been hard because the restaurant was so small that each of the three tables were steps away from the door. Plus, our table was next to the door)

[Pause] Ok, say this is when I started to lose faith in humanity. Whatever happened to the customer being right? Whatever happened to good service? How about anger management?

So, the owner/chef went back into the kitchen. We just paid whatever we had to pay, but with no tip, and left. Many of us were angry because we hadn't been treated like this in a restaurant in our lives.

Where did we go next? The Japanese restaurant next door because one of us was still hungry on account of that miniature vegetarian dish. There we talked about how we were all going to remember this event for a long long time. Some of us wished that that the restaurant would shut down when we were through with it. We talked about the No Name brand tomato sauce they used. We talked about egging the windows.

Despite all this, I found the experience quite enjoyable (mostly because I was sitting off to the side, further away from the heat of the moment). Where else would you find the opportunity to get kicked out of a restaurant and to listen to people argue about the bill? Where else would you see all the fragile tenets of customer service carelessly broken? Personally, I found it to be like something out of a TV show. I laughed knowing that with this owner's attitude and behaviour, this restaurant would probably shut down in the coming months.