Last night we go to The Barking Crab in downtown Boston. It’s a great crab restaurant, they seat you at large picnic tables, you have a rock to break your crab, and you get seated next to people and meet them and eat with them. It’s also pricey-- 2 dungeoness crabs, fries, and drinks runs about $100, so we treat ourselves maybe once or twice a summer.
So last night there are three of us, and we get seated in the middle of a picnic table that has a couple on either end. Neither couple was particularly happy, but whatever. I say, “Hi” but they’re not particularly sociable, so we talk each in our respective groups. Each couple was starting to eat when we sat down, so pretty soon they’ve finished up, paid and left, and our meal arrives.
We start eating, and the hostess arrives to seat a couple where one of the previous couples was. The couple doesn’t want to sit there and they go away. The hostess comes back and tries to seat another couple, and they don’t like the seating arrangement either. The young man asks the hostess to move us down, and the hostess asks me to move down the table.
At this point we’re in the middle of our meal. We’ve got buckets with crabs in, we’ve got buckets of shells, we’ve got plates, drinks, fries, all in our area of the table. My hands are messy with crab. She’s asking us to move about 3 feet down. I tell her that if she’d asked before our meal arrived, we’d have been happy to move, but currently we were right in the middle of dinner, and moving our entire dinner down to the end of the table was not going to happen. She had seated us where she wanted us, there was plenty of room for the couple, and if they wanted to sit or not that was up to them.
They went away.
A bit later the manager came by and asked us how the meal was. I told him the service was good, and the food was great, but there was this little thing about being asked to move (I was anticipating that this was going to be his next question). I told him that if he was here to ask me to move in the middle of my dinner, then I would pay my bill and leave, and never come back. He said, “But this table seats eight.” I told him that he was free to seat an additional five people in the seats that were available, but I wasn’t moving.
He went away.
When the waitress came back and asked us if we’d like dessert, I told her that it seemed to me that the manager needed the table, and we’d take our bill and leave.
So I went from loving this restaurant to never wanting to go there again. Was I a dick?
