Restaurant Launches ‘Staff Sociability’ Options So You Can Decide How Chatty Your Waiter Will Be

We’re lucky to live in a city that prides itself on great service – not only in terms of being effective and quick, but also effortlessly warm and personable – and man are we grateful for it.

But it seems not everyone sees things that way, as evidenced by this poster from the Royal Penguin Restaurant in the heart of Kathmandu’s tourist quarter, shared today by Reddit user echo_zoo.

It offers users a choice of three options for the ‘intensity of staff communication’, from ‘High Sociability’ to the ominous-sounding ‘Stealth Mode’ – in which “the staff will provide brief answers in a friendly manner, but will never speak to you first”.

Yikes.

Sure, we’ve all had days where we’d rather keep a low profile and leave out the chats, and sure the enthusiasm can be irritating at times – as Bill Bryson once put it: “I just wanted a cheeseburger, not a relationship”. But that’s all part of the dining experience; one of the many variables that we submit ourselves to when we decide to eat out.

This certainly takes things to a whole new extreme, so let’s hope we don’t see signs like this popping up in Dublin any time soon.

Might work for the hairdresser, mind…