My husband couldn't get over the breakfasts. He'd lived in the US in the past, but didn't really run around with a lot of Americans when he was here, so he hadn't been introduced to The American Breakfast. When we visited my family, there was a lot of eating out, and at one point he was just like"Dforce, I can't do it…

My German friends: "Your cake is so good! So moist! How do you make it so soft?"

German here. That is not the norm. WTF was wrong with that guy?

its not a norm. i'm european - and as an english teacher have been fortunate to live in a number of different countries. i've never billed for bread, and i would remember - my wages were kinda shitty. (that sounded more like someone trying to take advantage of tourists imo.)

Also, when I was with a group of 20 Americans, the waiter totally tried to fleece them, attempting to charge for: an extra meal, the pitchers of water (by law, these are free when from the tap, as many as you want!), and a fork that had dropped on the ground (wtf?!). He was a total jerk just because they didn't speak…

I have to tell this story but it probably won't be as good as the way my boyfriend tells it.

My question there is what is a grill joint doing with frozen hamburgers! *gasp*

Wtf?! That's so inefficient! It can't possibly be German!

We once ate in the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. We thought it odd that the waiter did not write down our orders, but assumed he had a remarkable memory. My dinner came out relatively quickly, my husband's did not. After a few moment of observation, we noted that seemed not to be the practice here - when your order was…

My favorite Italian waiter story was at a traditional Roman style place in Trastevere. Really good, really legit old school Roman food, so very, very heavy. We had walked across the whole damn city so we over-0rdered with suppli (fried risotto) to start and heavy, pork-laden pasta as the first courses for each of us.…

These stories reminded me on when I was briefly working for this fancy juice/small "healthy" meal chain (hint, it was owned by Starbucks because they wanted to cash in on the juice trend). All the food was assembled from a pretty straightforward salad bar situation, but being a branch of Starbucks the managers…

This isn't a restaurant story but it is customer service related. I used to work at a call center. This dude i'll call 'Stompy' (the reason for which will become apparent later) was always kind of strange but overall a nice guy. Anyway, I'm two cubicles away from Stompy and it's a slow day so i'm just checking my…

I'm with you here. Know basic shit about where you're going, especially when it comes to restaurants! Honestly, I think the Aussies are the ones who come off poorly in this story...

I once ate at this little bistro in this really artsy part of town. The food was fantastic and the service was fantastic. Until our server disappeared. We'd had a male server. When we finally managed to wave over another server, a woman, we told her we wanted to pay our bill and she asked who our server was.

I think eating bread is just sort of "default" with every meal so everyone knows it's gonna be there.

Then e-mail me your bartending tales. :-p

Is it normal to try to sneak extra bread onto the table so you can charge more? Because that's bullshit in any culture.

In southern Europe it's totally normal to pay for bread. Sometimes you pay for the tableware, too. Read the guide book! (As we do to find out about crazy tipping in the USA)

During high school I washed dishes in what passed for a fancy seafood restaurant in my outer-borough neighborhood. The entrees came out with a twice-baked potato and a little mini-bowl of vegetables. The owner instructed us that if potato or vegetable came back untouched we were to give it to the cook so he could…

These are all so good, and reminds of this time in Italy (here comes a customer perspective story):