How to have a bad restaurant experience

1. When you show up as a party of four, not the five of your reservation, you see a death-ray shoot from host's eye. (It misses.)

2. Before seating you, host asks if you'll "be done by 6:30."

3. Host seats you at a table positioned close to bathrooms, coffee station, and bussed china and glassware. That there is such a table gives you reason to wonder why you've come here.

4. Ask for different table. Host's answer: "I'll have to reset." Yet tables are already set.

5. Walk back to front of restaurant and wait to be reseated. Realize while waiting that host seems to follow no known protocols of hospitality.

6. Stand around while new arrivals enter and wait behind you. "Party of three?" "Uh, four." No: host meant the party of three standing behind you. It's the party of three that's being seated first. You are being punished.

7. Sit and look at menu, one page in length. It specifies plating fees if you bring your own dessert. Huh?

8. Feel waiter's death-ray warm as everyone chooses water for a beverage. Feel said ray further warm as everyone orders a relatively modest dish (vegan or vegetarian).

9. Notice that waiter seems to be writing a sonnet with each diner's order. Yet none of this writing appears on the bill.

10. Wait 45 minutes for food.

11. Food is served. Waiter serves by reaching across the table, rather than serving from behind the diner.

12. Consider the food. Meh. Upside-down pizza is bland, lifeless. A plate of jasmine rice and veggies holds a small mound of rice and a hand-sized serving of vegetables on a massive plate. Wonder whether they teach sarcastic presentation in culinary school.

13. Eat, with at least six interruptions to fill water glasses, all with much reaching across the table, elbows and armpits everywhere.

14. Notice when returning from bathroom that other diners seem to have markedly larger quantities of vegetables on their plates. And those vegetables are side dishes.

15. Get and pay bill. Tip 15%. Dodge host's death-ray near door. Leave, vowing never to come back.

16. GO TO COLD STONE CREAMERY!