While your restaurant may have a policy against taking call-aheads, the hosts and signs at the Macaroni Grill we frequent encourage calling ahead, although they will not add your name more than one hour in advance. No, they do not take reservations, but getting your name on the list via a phone call has never been a problem.

As for our smoking preference, while we did ask for a non-smoking table, we were seated at a table right next to the table where the party seated before us was placed. Both tables were non-smoking, so we still should have been seated before them.

To address the “confusion” of the host staff, there were three or four members of the staff, plus a manager in the general vicinity. However, it was only the idiot hostess that took names, assigned parties to tables, and removed names from the list. When the manager wasn’t on the phone dealing with someone, she was mostly just supervising, helping very little with the actual table assignments. And the remainder of the host staff just brought people to their tables when told by the idiot hostess. If anything was “lost in translation,” it happened between the idiot hostess’s brain cells.

I’ve been to many restaurants in my short twenty-four years. I understand that it is a tough job, but if you’re not cut out to do it, go work at McDonald’s or bus the tables instead of screwing up my dining experience from the beginning. I don’t deny that there are many considerations taken when seating parties, but I can’t see how this idiot hostess didn’t disregard the priority of seating parties of the same number and smoking preference on a first-come, first-served basis.

We didn’t lose out patience with the host staff until well after twenty minutes of waiting for our “five minute wait” without being seated. We routinely accept hour long waits for tables at restaurants in the Chicago area, but when we’re told we’ll be seated in five minutes, you damn well better seat us in five or ten minutes. If we were told it would be about a half hour for a table, that would have been fine.

I am generally understanding to anyone who works in the food business, from the hostesses to the waiters to the table bussers. What I don’t tolerate is the uncalled for stupidity and lack of courtesy by other people. When it’s called for, I’m fine with it, although I may not be at the time of the stupidity.

Also, good luck with the communications degree.