My favorite restaurant in the entire world is The Prado restaurant in Balboa Park in San Diego. In Chicago, Quartino is fun!

DH and I are going to Chicago for a few days next week and we're trying to find some good restaurants to go to--so if you have any ideas about great places to eat in Chi-town, tell me about them!

Restaurants workers do need to take allergies seriously. I once watched a woman go into anaphylactic reaction after she told the waiter how allergic to seafood she was. She asked the waiter to make sure the chef used a clean pan that hadn't touched seafood and to use a knife that hadn't touched seafood. Apparently they didn't take her too seriously. They had to call an ambulence as she administered herself an epi pen. Pretty scary stuff. I hope they learned a lesson.

I have a family member who is gluten free but she's very annoying about it in restaurants. She grills the waitstaff and I mean GRILLS them. I always tell her to speak to the manager about it rather than the poor waitress who has no clue. She should also call ahead, right? But she gives the waitstaff such a hard time. She's just bitchy about it. Those are the people who give gluten free eaters a b ad name!

I completely understand wanting to avoid gluten even if you aren't allergic to it. I also think that restaurant servers should know whether or not their menu items have gluten or not, but if there is something on the menu that doesn't specify, you should probably just avoid it to make sure you don't accidentally get gluten. Instead of hassling the server, it might not be a bad idea to let the chef know and maybe he/she can put whether or not an item is GF right on the menu. The servers usually don't know anything other than what's printed on the menu because they aren't cooking the food.

I went to a restaurant and the waiters actually had tablets to put in orders. They still managed to fuck everything up and send us the wrong bill...that's an achievement.

Me to man in Mediterranean restaurant: "does your lentil soup have gluten in it?" Man, annoyed: "I don't make it so I don't know." Me: "well, can you check the label?" Man: "I know it's just red lentils. I'm sure." Me: "you're sure? You just said that you didn't know what was in it. I've had it before [when I was still eating gluten], and I know there are vegetables in it." Man: "No, there are no vegetables. There is just red lentils." Based on his attitude, I shouldn't have gotten the soup, but it's really good, and I've been craving it. There are clearly onions in this soup, so he was full of shit in that regards. There are little white things in there too which could easily be bits of pureed barley or something. I don't have a gluten sensitivity - have just been feeling really good eating gluten-free, so it's not the end of the world if there's gluten in there, but it pisses me off that he was annoyed, lied, and was completely unhelpful. Ass. Still: damn good soup.

So this guy I knew in HS just posted a huge rant about how much he hates Halloween on FB. He hates it because it's not a "real" holiday and all these stores and restaurants put up stuff "that's supposed to be scary but isn't scary at all" and that Americans are just a bunch of dumbasses who would rather be distracted by a silly holiday than worry about "what's really scary in this world". OK, jerk...maybe you just wasted ten minutes of your precious time writing a stupid rant instead of doing something productive?

There are a lot of pervs out there. A guy in a restaurant once rubbed his hand on my ass when I had a tray full of drinks and I couldn't knock his hand away. I called the mgr and had him escorted out. A lot of people were mad at ME for emabrressing a regular customer.

I once made a reservation for a restaurant using Open Table. The restaurant called three times to confirm my reservation. They weren't going to give up until they had spoken to me. I was beyond annoyed. It still really irritates me and makes me think twice about going there again. It's dinner; it's not so important you have to hunt me down and confirm that I'll be there.