- We've got a tip for waiters: give good service.

(From Canberra Times)

THEY are experiences all too familiar to most restaurant- goers. Vanishing restaurant bookings, waiters in hiding, corked wine, lipstick marks on glasses, hot meals served cold, cold beers served warm. Bad service emerged as the pet hate of Canberra restaurant customers in the What Canberra Thinks survey on dining habits in the national capital. More than half of all respondents said bad or rude service was what they disliked most when dining out, followed by long waiting times, then noise. The results were not surprising to the head of food and beverage studies at the Canberra Institute of Technology, Jerome De Rose, whose job it is to train the next generation of bar and waiting staff. ''Bad service is definitely a turn-off. Sometimes you go to a restaurant and the person dumps a plate in front of you, plonks the bottle of wine down without giving you a chance to taste it,'' he said. Students at CIT were taught not only the technical skills of being good waiter, Mr De Rose said, but also the extras that made dining out an enjoyable experience. ''A good waiter must have the ability to do more than is required, to go that extra yard to make the customer feel good, making them ...