I went to a restaurant with my mother and my aunt years ago that was in a little shopping center with a movie theater. We had been there before and it was pretty good; way better than the sports bar, more acceptable to my mother and aunt than the (pretty decent) Indian place nearby, and actually edible unlike the Bonefish Grill. We head on in and immediately there are problems.

The hostess tries to sit us right next to the kitchen and bathrooms in a restaurant that is 1/4 full. In a completely reasonable tone we ask if we can sit somewhere else, then the hostess looks at us and says "This is one of the best tables in the house, people request this table, why would you want to sit somewhere else?" After re-iterating our request she then seats us one table away...so we just give up and let it go.

Then we sit and wait, then wait some more, then wait a bit longer and just as we are considering leaving our server shows up. He seems pleasant enough, takes our drink orders, takes our food orders, and then disappears not to be seen again for a very long time. The restaurant is still a ghost town, I don't even see any other servers wandering around and eventually we flag down the hostess to ask where our drinks are. She "goes to find our server" and still nothing happens.

As if this wasn't all bad enough the staff shows even greater depths of stupidity in delivering everything to our table at once. The only time I've seen a more packed table in my life was at the second worst restaurant experience of my life where not a single dish was removed from our table for the entire meal at a local Ruth's Chris. Knowing we should have left a while ago we just plow through the food, which isn't nearly as good as the first time we went there, and then comes to long wait for the check.

I swear to god the whole staff was hiding in the kitchen giggling as we frantically tried to find someone to get the check from. The hostess disappeared, there are no other servers, no bussers, and this continues for a long time. Eventually I get up to find someone or at least bother the bartender and find our server hitting on some woman at the bar. We have been unfailingly polite up until this point but I just lose it, interrupt him and say "Hey, we want our check now, I don't feel like waiting another half an hour at the table". He gives me a full on death glare, says he will get right on it and turns back to the woman at the bar.

Eventually we got out of there, don't even bother complaining because it's not like we are coming back ever again and leave a 25 cent tip (just happened to be the difference between the bill and the cash we left). My aunt, in a fit of embarrassed stupidity, actually went back to the table and left $20 for the guy as my mother and I were walking out so I can only assume no lessons were learned.