Indian Taitais

I like Indian people and they are a great source of revenu for my restaurant, but damn! Indians taitais can be annoying customers in a restaurant some times!

Today we got a group of 15 Indian ladies that came for lunch. Any group of ladies is already kinda of trouble regardless of where they are from. Most of the ladies we get in the restaurant are expat wives. They normally live in big houses with Ayis (cleaning Chinese lady), they have a van and driver. The Ayis take care of the kids. Drivers take the kids to school and to their afternoon extracurricular activities. Most of these ladies don't work and they also don't have to do any house work, because Ayi does it for them. So basically they don't have anything to do during most of the day. If they are not getting their nails, their hair or something else done, they tend to gather in groups at different establishments where they gossip in a loud manner. For some reason I still don't fully understand why, most of them are very cheap. Considering their economical status and the expat life styles they have, they shouldn't be too worried about money. My only guess would be that they feel some kind of guilt for just spending money all day long. These kinda lady is normally known as a "Taitai".

A lot of our business depends on these "Taitais". We really try to pull them to choose our establishment as their gathering point to spend some of their money while they gossip. This requires a lot of patience from the people hosting these gatherings. Taitais are very disorganized, everyone of them has an opinion and they all want it their own way. Also, there normally is a language barrier between the Chinese waitress and the group of ladies. This, added to the confussion of the ladies, becomes a disaster! While some of them are trying to organize things and order things to share some others are ordering just for their own. Some others aren't ordering anything because they are too concentrated talking while the waitress is waiting for them to decide what they want. Only taking the order takes for ages and then they complain about how long things took to be served.

Now, Indian Taitais can be specially difficult. A lot of Indians have special diets where they don't eat either beef; pork; beef and pork; chicken; beef, pork and chicken; or meat at all. There are also some of them who are vegans. It all depends on their beliefs or regional culture. So when you get a big group of people all trying to order with their specifications, believe me, it can be a PAIN!

At the end of their meal, trying to figure out who ordered what and who owes what, becomes another big problem. They count penny per penny until everything gets perfectly settled.

Anyways, there are also fun Taitais out there, that's for sure. Taitais that like to enjoy their taitai life in uncomplicated manner. Cheers for those!