Dear Restaurants:

I am a good cook. I make food that I enjoy eating. So when I go out for dinner, what I’m looking for and paying for is good food and a good experience. Please don’t ask me to be an enforcer to make those things happen. The bar? It’s not that high. Don’t rip me off, don’t upsell me, and don’t act like we’re in your way by dining at your restaurant. I’ll tip well, appreciate all of your effort and expertise, I will tell friends about your place, and I will come back.

Assume I will want tap water, and have sparkling as the option. Toronto’s tap water is very good. Collectively, we’re very lucky to have it. I enjoy drinking it. Don’t hairy eyeball us over our choice to support it.

When you bring us the menu, please say something about it. Don’t dump a pile of papers on the table and then run away.

Don’t upsell me on bread. Especially without making it clear that you are selling me bread ($3). And if I say yes to bread, and then discover that the dish already comes with bread, I will be very unhappy.

Don’t assume I am stupid. I have probably seen prosciutto before. That is probably why I ordered it. So if you serve me thickly cut prosciutto, like, rashes of streaky bacon thick, and it’s intentional, it’s probably best to say something about it. Otherwise, I will probably assume that someone, somewhere doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I know. If I am served food which is not prepared properly, like freakishly thick prosciutto or grey boar chops, I should point it out, and I should send it back. But please understand that I hate doing this. Many people hate doing this. Many people (like me) will just never come back.

Though. Even those of us who are loathe to send our plates of ill-prepared food back to the kitchen, even we will tip you off. If you come to collect a plate, and there is a sizeable amount of meat left on it — you really should ask why. Ditto a sizeable amount of cheesecake. And we don’t mistake avoidance for efficiency. Whisking away a plate on the sly without asking how it was denies the diner the chance to either ask you to make it right, or to give you feedback on how you might make it right for someone else.

And, finally, failing everything else, please, please do not drop off our desserts and then abandon our table. There is nothing that sours an evening more quickly than being abandoned. I literally cannot leave until you return. No one likes not being able to leave. By the time the table is at the point of joking that they’re being forced into a dine-and-dash, the server’s tip percentage has been severely compromised.

And speaking of being unable to leave. It’s Toronto. In October. I’d like my coat back. If you took it, please be ready to return it. If I’m standing at the front and standing at the front and standing at the front for long enough that I give up and go rummaging through the coatrack myself, it’s a cold itchy scarf of bitterness on a jacket of disappointment.

I’ve been wanting to try this restaurant for a while. And, yes, it was a group buy coupon that finally motivated me to get around to going.

But it was the letdowns from every station that left me tipping only on the post-coupon bill. And that, for me, is terrible. I am a good tipper. I am an overtipper. It’s a perverse expression of some remnant of Catholic guilt, and I can’t shake it. So it has to be a truly bad experience to show up in my tip. The kind of experience that ensured I won’t be back, and that I’ll tell others why.