ARLINGTON, Va. — Diners at a renowned Chinese food restaurant in Arlington, Virginia were shocked when they got their bill Saturday night.
It was not the price of their meal at Peter Chang, rather it was the words their server used to describe them. Words that were printed at the bottom of their $114 check.
The Richmond-area diners asked that their names not be used in the story. They were described in the bill as “a plad [sic] a**hole” and a man with “a small penis.”
The diners say they were shocked when they saw the two additional lines added to the bottom of their bill.
One man at the table told the Washington Post the bad blood may have started with a question about the authenticity of the rice. He remembered another diner in his party, who had lived in Beijing for years, asking the server, “Oh, you guys don’t serve them in individual rice bowls?”
The server apparently offered to give the table individual bowls if they preferred, explaining that when three or four people eat at Peter Chang the rice is served family style. While the man though it was odd, and not what he experienced in China, all of the diners declined individual portions, the Washington Post reported.
It wasn’t until after the meal, when they spotted the offensive items at the bottom of the bill, that they spoke with the server and then the manager.
The group was eventually told the server entered that information into the system with the intent of deleting it before printing it out and giving it to them. That, of course, did not happen.
The men said they got the feeling the staff believed it was all a big joke. After some back and forth, the restaurant’s manager eventually offered them a $20 gift certificate to the restaurant.
An email sent to Peter Chang’s Arlington has not yet been returned, however the restaurant’s manager did respond to a Washington Post reporter.
If manager Qian Cheng wasn’t deeply apologetic on Saturday, he was on Monday morning when reached for comment. He said that the servers had previously been warned before about leaving offensive comments in the system.
“They always do that. I’ve told them so many times,” Cheng said. “And they did it again.”
He’s weighing whether someone needs to be fired over the incident, but in the meantime, Cheng said he has cut back the servers’ hours. They will not work prime weekend shifts in the near future.
“I know it’s not comfortable,” Cheng said about the incident. “If somebody had given me the check, I [wouldn’t] be comfortable.”
