Expat New Yorker calls out Europeans for bad customer service sparking global dining out debate

An American in Spain has sparked a furious online debate by calling out Europeans for their subpar customer service.Adam Pecoraro, an expat from New York, took to TikTok to share the cardinal cultural lesson living in Europe has taught him: “Nobody in any of these countries gives a flying f–k about anybody else’s time,” he raged, captioning the video with the caveat “I really love it here, but urgency is a very North American concept.”The fitness coach then detailed how a leisurely meal on the Iberian Peninsula amounts to, at minimum, “a four-hour ordeal.”He underscored that this relaxed pacing isn’t about a culture of enjoyment or the establishment wanting you to relax and live “la dolce vita” but rather “because the service is genuinely bad, objectively horrific.” Pecoraro then outlined how his average restaurant experiences have played out across the pond.“When you walk into a restaurant, you’re lucky even to get seated,” he said, adding that after they take you to a table, it takes 10-30 minutes to get a menu from the wait staff.“When you finally order, you’ll never see the server again,” he said, noting that after the food is delivered, waitstaff will “disappear; they’ll scurry away and they’ll go somewhere – you don’t know where.

Their job is to serve, but you’ll never see them again,” he griped.His diatribe continued, noting that it’s nearly impossible to get another round of drinks, and when it comes time to pay, servers are all but absent.

“Of course, they don’t want to rack up a bill,” he reasoned, “They don’t really care because they’re not getting tipped.That’s why the service is so bad.”Pecoraro suggests that the absence of gratuity explains the lack of effort but does not justify the lack of efficiency.

“If they don’t want to be there and they don’t want to do their jobs, at least come back to see how things were and then cash me out because it’s better for both of us,” ...