Food; by far one of the best words in the English vocabulary. Since not all of us can excel at making good food, we go to restaurants to quench our food-lovin’ thirst. Like any other institution, there are some unwritten dos and don’ts people tend to follow when it comes to restaurants, but when have we, le great people of Dhaka, ever been mainstream? Here’s a list of things people in Dhaka can be seen doing in restaurants, with unmatched persistence. 1. Bringing outside-food inside
We all know some restaurants blatantly rip us off. You order a bottle of Pepsi, and when the waiter hands it to you, you wonder to yourself: I knew it! I shouldn’t have shaved. They confused me with a child and gave me this mini version of the real thing. Two sips and all that soft drink goodness gone.
Are we going to sit down and submit to such torture? Of course not. We buy the cheaper and bigger bottle and take it with us. The sign might say No outside food allowed, but we are born rebels. Not only this, but with all these carts all around Dhaka city, people stalk restaurants to just creep in, finish their food (bought from the cart), and leave.
2. Tipping like a gimcrack
A foreign faculty was once talking about the way he figures out how much he should tip. He said he tips 20 percent of what the total bill is. You know you’re cheap when you were nodding up until he said 20, but fell off your chair when instead of taka, he said percent. Some very few people in Dhaka may be generous tippers, but most of us aren’t. Some make ridiculous excuses to get out of tipping too. “Did the waiter just take more than 20 milliseconds to answer my queries about what a fettuccini is? Oh what is that? That’s the sound of your tip (30 bucks) gluing itself to my wallet”. So cheap, yet so shameless- it’s an art. 3. Memory Loss Too many people tend to forget that they’re in a restaurant, and not their personal living rooms. Most people have no sense of their surrounding or whether they’re making people uncomfortable. People talk over each other, ranting about bowel movements and their goo-ey love lives, not stopping until the waiter comes over and asks them to keep it down. Does this stop them though? No. You look for the probable complainers and give them the stink eye, and continue. 4. Foodbanking “Do you have free wifi” “Yes, ma’am” *Successfully logs into Facebook and asks for an ‘urgent’ review* *Hates what she orders*
After the food is served, people take more pictures of it than brides in weddings. Without flash, with flash, with their favourite filter, with their other favourite filter, and what not. Moreover, even though you get access to a huge load of helpful information from these Facebook review posts, you cannot avoid the fact that some people misuse the power that they have. Things like putting their own hair in the food to avoid paying the bill or helping the competitors tarnish their image, is very common these days. 5. Being judinators: Remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the movie Terminator could have access to this whole chunk of data about something just by looking at it? I really think that the character is based on us “Dhakaiyas”. People go to restaurants and more than food, tend to look at other people, scan them from head to toe, and um, judge them. Is he wearing a Bata sandal in Mainland China? “What a disgrace!” For the people who love shoving their opinions down other’s throats, eating does not seem like a good excuse to stop. 6. Ordering food after ages We all have that one friend that’s always late. We go to eat somewhere with our friends, but can’t order until that friend gets here. So we wait, and even in times when everyone is there, it takes us hours to finish gossiping or contemplating which dish is worth the few hundred bucks I have, without actually ordering. The waiter stands at our table with a notepad, only to give up after a while and walk away. 7. Calculating away Right when you’re handed the bill and the presumed Tk350 has somehow become Tk1098, you get your calculators out immediately. You regret not having paid enough attention in math class then, more than ever before. VAT, service charge, “because-I-felt-like-it” charge etc almost makes actual steam come out of your ears. No matter how many times you’ve calculated it, you don’t want to stop until you find some glitch and get out of paying the obscene amount, but it’s never your lucky day, people of Dhaka. Never your lucky day.
