I love cooking, but I also love, love dining out. I love divey hole-in-the-walls where the only seats available are on dinky stools in food stalls (with slightly questionable sanitation), I love everyday affordable ethnic and “new American” casual restaurants, and I love the experience of five-star, multi-course tasting menus at coats-required restaurants. What I do not love, though is terrible service. In a city as competitive as New York, restaurants with rude service deserve only to go out of business. I rather just get delivery than deal with nasty service.

Tonight, we encountered the rudest service of my life in the company of Chris’s parents when the server at Olio e Piu had the nerve to wrestle the check holder out of Chris’s hands when Chris had already insisted he was *not* ready to give him the check. “Yes, you are ready to leave now,” the server responded to Chris. As you can imagine, this resulted in a lot of other diners staring at this pathetic act of idiocy. And Chris doesn’t take crap from anyone, so he let the server have it. The server was the rudest, most condescending person I’ve ever encountered on a restaurant wait staff. We went there just for drinks and were never told we had to order dinner in order to be seated in the outside dining area, and then we got scolded at by the host, which led to attitude and abrupt behavior by our server, who already had an icy tone when he first said hello to us. Restaurants that offer “hospitality” like this deserve to go out of business; there’s no place for that in New York – or anywhere, for that matter.