Stop Them Before They Joke Again : You may be a real card, but waiters and waitresses have heard it all before

There’s an old Hollywood joke that goes like this: Two men are talking. One says to the other, “So, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m an actor,” the guy replies.

And the first man says, “Oh. Which restaurant do you work at?”

We’ve all heard about the stupid things waiters say to customers; this week we decided to turn the tables and ask waiters and waitresses what customers tell them. Judging from the ones we spoke with, you practically have to be an Olivier to keep a straight face while listening to some of the most common lines over and over again.

Says a waiter from Morton’s, “I wouldn’t be in this business if I were thin-skinned.”

Ask a group of customers if they want anything else, for instance, and chances are one will respond: “Yes, a million dollars.” Or a Ferrari. Or a house in Malibu. “It’s always money, cars or houses,” says Marianne Duffy, who waits tables at Chez Jay in Santa Monica.

And if a customer eats everything off his plate, Duffy says, “he’ll almost always say, ‘I didn’t like it’ . . . then laugh.”

These are usually the same people who, when Duffy asks if they want their check, respond: “No, but the table next to us does.”

Patina waiter David Stork has cornered the market on bird stories. When the restaurant had partridge on the menu, many customers sang their order: “I’ll have a par-tri-idge in a pear tree. . . .”

“At every restaurant I’ve worked in,” says Beth Allyn, who has waited tables for 15 years and now works at DC3, “customers who eat a lot always tell me they need a wheelbarrow to carry them out. Fifteen years!”

Dieters are a problem too. We all know people who order burgers and fries . . . and a diet Coke. But at Patina customers ask for sauce on the side--and then gobble up every fattening drop. “They always end up eating twice as much as they would have if they’d just let the kitchen do the dish the usual way,” says one longtime waiter.

Campanile foodies constantly ask waiter Jim Williams for low-fat cappuccinos: “I tease them and say, ‘Sure, if you’re not going to have dessert.’ And they say, ‘Oh, come on. . . .’ ”

Mock indignation is rampant among restaurant-goers. At Citrus, says waiter Claude Herscovici, “Everybody has the same line when we’re out of a dish. They say, ‘Oh, well, we’re leaving . . .’ and then pretend to get up.” There’s a similar routine when he pours wine for tasting. “The customers will take a sip,” Herscovici says, “and then, for a joke say, ‘Oh, it’s terrible, send it back.”

Chez Jay’s Duffy says that customers who drink a lot often claim that their cocktail “just evaporated” when she asks if they’d like a refill. At the Tam O’Shanter in Glendale, Jennifer Vally gets regular requests for virgin Martinis and virgin Manhattans. “What do they want,” she wonders, “just a glass?”

Vally also gets the name-droppers. “People come in and tell us, ‘I’m friends with Mr. O’Shanter,’ ” she says. “And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, sure you are.’ Our restaurant is owned by Lawry’s, so it is run by the Frank family.”

Over at 72 Market Street, maitre d’ Chris Thomas often hears: “Is Dudley here?” Actor Dudley Moore is a partner in the restaurant. And maitre d’ Chris Thomas constantly gets calls from people who want the address of the restaurant. “They feel kind of dumb when we tell them,” he laughs.

Some innocent questions can turn out to be a real pain. “When customers ask ‘What’s good here?’ ” says Spago’s Steve Hodak, “I guide them through the menu. I ask what foods they like. ‘We like everything, everything,’ they say. So I say, ‘Well, the foie gras is very good.’ And they say, ‘Oh, we hate that.’ ‘How about the seared shrimp with spring rolls?’ I’ll suggest. ‘We hate shrimp,’ they say.”

Then if an order comes out of the kitchen wrong , Hodak hears the line: “There goes your tip.” “There are a lot of situations the waiter is responsible for,” Hodak says, “but there are some things we are just an agent for. It can make you crazy.”

At least the some customers have a sense of humor, but sometimes people can be downright selfish. “We’ve actually had people have heart attacks in the restaurant,” says Tam O’Shanter’s Vally. “Someone’s lying there on the floor and we’ve got customers mad that they can’t get to their table--they try to walk over the person. We’ve got the shirt open, we’re doing CPR, and they say, ‘Excuse me, could we have dinner here?’ I guess it was the dinner hour.”

Brentwood Daily Grill waiter Evan Greenberg considers himself an expert on difficult customers. He grew up with two of them: his parents. “Waiters hate my parents,” Greenberg says. “My dad is like the character in ‘When Harry Met Sally. . . .’ He wants this this way, that way, this on the side. And if you can’t do it his way, he doesn’t want anything.”

Still, Greenberg admits that he gets annoyed when a customer orders, say, a Cobb salad, but without the avocados or without the bacon. “Which is fine,” Greenberg says, “but then they don’t really want a Cobb salad.”

OK, so you wouldn’t be so uncool as to demand a Cobb salad without avocados, but have you ever ordered a dry martini with the line, “Just whisper ‘Vermouth’ over the glass”? Or how about, “Make my steak so rare that it can walk out to the table”? These corny cliches come from a waiter at North Hollywood’s Le Petit Chateau. “People just can’t help themselves,” he says.

But even easy customers can be a problem: “When a customer sincerely says, ‘Thanks, the service was great,’ or ‘You were excellent,’ ” Spago’s Hodak says, “it immediately strikes fear in the heart of any food server. It usually means a 10% tip for the waiter.” Hodak’s never figured out why this happens.

Hodak--who, by the way, hopes to become a doctor, not an actor--has some parting advice for restaurant customers: “You never want to piss off the person who is handling what you are putting in your mouth.” And one line that’s sure to get your waiter’s goat is the double-decaf-half-caf cappuccino line from the movie “L.A. Story”: Almost every waiter we spoke with brought it up.

Of course, waiters aren’t the only ones with complaints. I, for one, will promise not to sing my order--if you guys promise not to tell me your names.

The Restaurant News column will resume next week.