All posts tagged: Restaurant

8 Behaviors Restaurant Servers Immediately Notice About Awful Customers

8 Behaviors Restaurant Servers Immediately Notice About Awful Customers

We underestimate how influential rude customers are on service workers. Not only do they create more stress, but they can harm mental health and productivity. Paying for a service comes with expectations, especially in a time where spending money on a meal is becoming a luxury. But there are still noticeable behaviors restaurant servers instantly recognize about their awful customers. Restaurant servers recognize these behaviors in awful customers 1. They don’t do small talk BearFotos | Shutterstock Many of the rudest customers don’t see service workers as people, but as robots to fulfill their desires. They overlook all the basic parts of human connection, like eye contact and small talk, in favor of their own comfort. Servers can tell just how much grace and empathy someone has right away because they feel dehumanized. Customers like this don’t say hello to anyone. They don’t use their basic manners. They may not even respond to “How are you?” from a server, instead jumping right into ordering. RELATED: 10 Annoying Habits of People Who Don’t Know How To …

We’re over restaurant slop

We’re over restaurant slop

Recently, between medical appointments, I ended up at a grain-bowl-and-salad place in a suburban strip mall, the kind of sleek fast-casual restaurant that looks a little like an Apple Store decided to start serving brown rice and green goddess dressing. There were a few customers in scrubs and two self-order kiosks, both broken. The menu wasn’t posted anywhere else, except via a QR code printed on the back of several glossy takeout menus behind the register, which the cashier repeatedly warned us not to take because they only had a few. The bowls themselves were fine. Watching them come together was more memorable: the cashier held each plastic container practically at arm’s length as he scooped, two vapes clacking around in his apron pocket, with the air of someone completing a task wholly unrelated to food. What arrived cost about $14 and tasted perfectly acceptable. It was also, somehow, shockingly anonymous. There’s a word for this feeling now: slop.  It describes several overlapping anxieties about modern restaurant food, but its prehistory belongs, at least partly, …

Quaglino’s reopening: London restaurant news and new openings

Quaglino’s reopening: London restaurant news and new openings

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in London restaurants are rather fond of rebirth. Close the doors, rip out something expensive that somebody else installed five years ago, add a bar, call it a “new chapter” and hope everyone has forgotten what the old one was like. Sometimes, though, a comeback is worth paying attention to. This week, one of London’s great grand dining rooms is dusting itself off, a Soho dim sum restaurant has somehow persuaded one of cinema’s greatest directors to oversee its makeover and the restaurant claiming to serve London’s best Sunday lunch is venturing beyond Borough Market for the first time in two decades. Elsewhere, Kiln appears to be quietly producing half of the next generation of London restaurateurs, the Kudu team have discovered they cannot quite quit south London, Firangi is using a Highbury residency as live research for the restaurant it hopes to open one day and an Arcade favourite is …

London restaurant news: The world’s best pizza is now in Chiswick

London restaurant news: The world’s best pizza is now in Chiswick

The best pizza in the world can now be found in London. To make matters worse, the awards ceremony was held in Naples. Napoli on the Road has taken the global number one spot for the first time, after three years as Europe’s best pizzeria. Elsewhere, Smithfield is starting to get interesting, Luke Farrell is taking things up a notch in Marylebone, Canary Wharf has found another roof upon which to put a restaurant and Chelsea is opening somewhere where you can have dinner in a bath. Here’s what’s new in London restaurants this week. The world’s best pizza is now in London There are awards that need explaining and others that do not. Napoli on the Road has been named the best pizzeria in the world. Michele Pascarella’s London operation took first place in the 50 Top Pizza World 2026 ranking, ahead of Una Pizza Napoletana in New York and Confine in Milan. Better still, this was all announced at a ceremony in Naples, giving London the rare pleasure of beating the Italians at …

Former lawyer who pulled gun on ex-wife in Ohio restaurant is convicted of attempted murder

Former lawyer who pulled gun on ex-wife in Ohio restaurant is convicted of attempted murder

A former attorney was convicted of attempted murder after officials in Ohio said he tried to carry out the “public execution” of his ex-wife in a Toledo restaurant last year. Matthew Exton, 43, tried to shoot her, but the gun’s safety was on, and a waiter tackled him before he could try again, the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office said in a news release Friday. Exton was also convicted of two counts of felonious assault, with sentencing enhancements linked to all three charges, the prosecutor’s office said. Exton was acquitted of one count of assault. He is scheduled to be sentenced later this month. During a trial that ended last week, Exton testified that he’d worked as a prosecutor in Michigan and was licensed to practice law in Ohio. He’d handled divorce, family and bankruptcy cases, he said, but he became homeless after he split up with his wife. The couple divorced in 2024, according to court records. He testified that he was frustrated by how she’d handled certain aspects of their divorce when he pulled …

New London restaurant openings this week: Six to know

New London restaurant openings this week: Six to know

London appears to have picked the second week of September to open everything at once. Two cult Japanese pop-ups become a three-storey restaurant in Notting Hill, one of the men responsible for Norman’s returns to Hackney having sworn off fry-ups, La Petite Maison invents the £9 neighbourhood coffee and Soho gains somewhere to eat wagyu shepherd’s pie, which feels less like news than the fulfilment of a prophecy. Elsewhere, Din Tai Fung has found room for a fifth London restaurant and one of London’s better-known smashburger brands has inherited the original Patty & Bun site. The circle of life, only with American cheese. Anyone hoping for a quiet week should probably stay home. Nakimushi, Notting Hill Nakimushi gives two cult Japanese residencies a permanent home in Notting Hill (Nakimushi) Notting Hill’s seemingly limitless appetite for expensive Japanese food will be tested again on Monday, although Nakimushi comes with rather better credentials than most. It is the latest restaurant from Chris D’Sylva, the man behind Michelin-starred Dorian, EEL Sushi, Supermarket of Dreams and the Notting Hill …

Kintsu, Colchester, Essex: ‘Style as well as substance’

Kintsu, Colchester, Essex: ‘Style as well as substance’

Amid all the bunting and hoopla of the platinum jubilee back in 2022, you may well have missed that Colchester, Britain’s oldest recorded settlement, got an upgrade from town to city status. And, as we all know, no true city is complete without at least one fancy restaurant that serves the likes of duck liver mousse on lattice tuiles. Well, in Colchester, Kintsu takes that slot. Or at least it did until May 2025, when chef Paul Wendholt abruptly shut up shop, citing financial pressures. The name Kintsu plays on the term kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold, silver or platinum or, more commonly, of embracing imperfection and making something pleasing out of bad luck. So it’s rather fitting that Wendholt, a two-time winner of the Essex Chef of the Year gong, managed to reopen Kintsu just four months later, and a year on is now offering eight courses, plus a few extras, for £90 a head in a Grade II-listed building, albeit one that’s down a back lane beside a multi-storey …

CNN Films revisits a forgotten 9/11 casualty — the restaurant at the ‘Top of the World’

CNN Films revisits a forgotten 9/11 casualty — the restaurant at the ‘Top of the World’

Michael Lomonaco can account for every minute of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — including the small decision that saved his life. Lomonaco, the executive chef who ran Windows on the World on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was on his way up to his office when he stopped at an optometrist shop on the ground level to have his eyeglass frames adjusted. He was still inside when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the tower above him at 8:46 a.m. “I felt the buidling shake,” he recalled in the new CNN Films documentary “Top of the World.” “And I thought that can’t be the subway. That’s impossible.” Lomonaco was evacuated. From the street, he watched employees of his own restaurant wave a white tablecloth from a window more than 100 floors up. Seventy-nine Windows on the World employees and 91 guests died that morning in the gastronomic soul of the Twin Towers — the one part of the complex that belonged to New Yorkers who …

London restaurant news: Jamie Oliver’s mentor returns to Soho

London restaurant news: Jamie Oliver’s mentor returns to Soho

September has traditionally been the point at which London’s restaurant scene wakes up from its August stupor. This year it appears to have set several alarms. Dishoom is plotting another major London opening, Jamie Oliver’s mentor Gennaro Contaldo is getting back into the business for the first time in nearly 20 years and two Michelin-starred chefs are moving their surf-and-turf restaurant into a Victorian Clerkenwell pub. There is also an improbable amount happening away from the conventional restaurant circuit. John Lewis has built a 300-seat restaurant on Oxford Street, a Quebec sports brasserie is using Kensington as a springboard for international expansion and Professor Green wants London to start eating his flying saucer-shaped sandwiches. Meanwhile, two Soho and Covent Garden newcomers – Saltwater and Cassette – are already attracting the sort of early doors chatter that usually means getting a table is about to become annoying. Here is your shortcut through the week’s restaurant noise. Bolo: Jamie Oliver’s mentor wants his pasta back Old-school Italian cooking is coming back to Soho with a fairly persuasive …

Kismet, London SE1: ‘The sort of beans that make you want to move to the sun’

Kismet, London SE1: ‘The sort of beans that make you want to move to the sun’

A Turkish-Cypriot meyhane, which translates roughly as “wine house”, has slotted in upstairs at the Globe Tavern in Borough Market, south London. Any cab driver worth his salt will bend your ear over the fact that this is “where Bridget Jones lives”, which might be a bit confusing if you’ve booked in to eat kuzu şiş (lamb neck kebabs) and to knock back a couple of rakis with a fermented turnip juice chaser. That Bridget Jones trivia, by the way, is completely true: the upstairs space at the Globe was used as the heroine’s gaff in that famous film franchise. Now, however, when you climb the staircase up to Kismet, an old, slightly eerie and flickering TV by the restaurant entrance begins to tell a very different tale. This is chef Keiran Mustafa’s very personal tribute to his family’s homeland and the community they built in London. Mustafa was the opening head chef at BiBi, to my mind one of the best restaurants in London, and before that he worked at industry stalwarts Chez Bruce …