Just last night we ran into another problem at a restaurant that has olives in a garden. We used a restaurant app to join the waitlist. We were first in line. Fifteen minutes later we arrived to a line out the door. Ok, we are waitlisted so it should be ok. The guy in front of us was arguing about being told he would be seated right away and then told it would be an hour. He complained and they seated him right away. I let them know I was there (I had also done it on the app) and a few minutes later the app let me know to return to be seated.
Now, they had 4 parties they were trying to seat all at once. Everyone that was doing the seating was confused over who they were seating. We were lead to the bar. NO. I don't sit in bars for any reason for dinner. We returned to the front and were told it would be a while to be seated. I explained that I was first on the waitlist. Well, a table just opened up and we were seated at one of 8 clean and empty tables in the main dining room.
So the main takeaway is there were 5 people working at the front desk with no clue as to what was going on or how to do a seating for a restaurant. If it were me, I would have asked each person who checked in if the bar was ok. I would have also asked each person to just wait until called. Once called, seat them as you obviously have a seat for them.
This seems to be a case of the "C" team working last night. Kind of like several employees of our past that just didn't have it in them to do a good job.