Jesse Mulligan Asks Restaurateurs: What’s The Weirdest Thing You’ve Seen At Work

Failed proposals, unruly children, unrulier adults... what’s going on in Auckland restaurants?Why is there so much sex in restaurants? Don’t you people have beds? When I first asked the city’s top restaurateurs to share the weirdest things they’d seen at work, I was surprised by a selection of “I was cooking at an event at the top of the Auckland Harbour Bridge,” reports one. “Part way through, a diner got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. He’d organised for a drone to film the whole thing. I still remember the woman’s response: ‘if you think I’d say yes to something like this, you clearly don’t know me’. The man stood back up and the drone hovered for a second, then flew away. The worst thing was we all had to stay up there with them for the next couple of hours.” “One night I spotted two children crouching next to the wall,” recalled another. “Their parents weren’t watching them. I looked closer and one of them was sticking a fork in and out of the electrical socket while the other turned the switch on and off. That’s why we now have a rule: no children we don’t know.” Some restaurateurs were either too sheltered or too discreet to participate in this survey. Then there were others who couldn’t stop once they’d started... “How about well-known law firm partners scouring the kitchen for cream chargers to get 39 seconds of joy with a balloon?” one suggested. “Or the guest who requested ‘nothing cooked’?”She had more. “One time, some big noter ordered our most expensive bottle of red wine, then complained it was corked. We brought him a replacement bottle and he told us it was corked too. My quick thinking maitre d’ went away and came back with the first bottle, disguised as a third option. ‘Finally!’ our guest said. ‘This one is perfect’.” What's the worst behaviour you've ever seen in a restaurant? Share your stories with Jesse Mulligan Email Jesse Of course, the bad behaviour isn’t always within a customer’s control. “One guy was sick (like properly sick) and created a line of vomit from his table, through our narrow restaurant and into the toilet,” one waitress recalled with dismay. “I didn’t even know it had happened until a guest approached me and said he had it in his hair.” Another source told me, “We were hosting a wedding one night. I came around the corner and saw our maitre d’ making out with a guest. They were both male. Later during the ceremony I recognised the guest – he was actually the groom. His marriage to the bride went ahead.” One thing I noticed is that classy restaurants are not immune to weird stuff. If anything, they attract it. I talked to chefs who’d worked at fine-dining restaurants where customers had turned up to eat in [checks notes] full bubble wrap and, on another occasion, “a guy and his girlfriend arrived in full kitty costumes. Dressed in fur from boots to ears”. “We had one couple at a two Michelin star restaurant [overseas] who decided to indulge a kink during their meal,” said one owner to me. “What was it?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer. She looked me up and down, trying to decide what exactly to tell me. “Well, let’s just say it looked like chardonnay in his glass, but it wasn’t.” According to Dining Out editor Jesse Mulligan.