1,001 Arabian Bites: When to speak up and when to let it go – that’s the question

A diner should feel entitled to delivering honest feedback about food she is paying to eat, than feel moved to later post an online review on a public platform for passive-aggressive histrionics.

“This fish dip smells interesting,” I might say, poking at the appetiser with a toast point even as it brings to mind the chumbucket on a recent fishing trip and how we scattered the potent, chopped-up unwanted fish as bait for larger game fish. I take a tentative bite of the dip; it’s OK. Smells worse than it tastes, but not far south enough for me to feel justified in sending it back. Regardless of the fact that it will go mostly uneaten – and that I’m well aware of this – I can pretty much guarantee that when the server comes around to check on things and to ask a perfunctory: “How is everything?” I won’t say, “I’m so glad you asked, because, actually, everything stinks.” Instead, I will almost certainly nod mechanically and give a giant thumbs up.

I wasn’t raised to tell a lie, but I was raised to be polite. How I’ve navigated my own discomfort with admitting dissatisfaction is not as indicative of my upbringing as it is a display of neuroses I’ve adopted along the way. Arab etiquette runs deep – it’s Byzantine and it’s uncompromising. Even when Arabs aren’t particularly kind to one other, we try to be nice.

I used to think there was such a thing as a white lie. Whenever I told one, I felt authorised to absolve my own discomfort with dishonesty by telling myself that I had fibbed out of the kindness of my heart. I also thought I was authorised to distinguish between different types of untruths and to classify them accordingly: white lies and wrong ones. A white lie is weightless; a wrong one keeps a person up all night, trying to figure out how to make things right again.

Where do such delusions of martyrdom come from? It’s not my job to protect people from things that shouldn’t hurt them in the first place. Plus, any impulse to do so undermines the other person’s ability for handling the truth. If you have a problem with your food, please say something, politely.

While I’m counterproductively sensitive to the thought that servers are not responsible for how much a patron likes her food, I also think servers are messengers who should be trusted to relate information from the dining room to the kitchen.

To me, it makes more sense that diners should feel entitled to deliver honest feedback about food they are paying to eat, than feel moved to post an online review on a public platform for passive-aggressive histrionics.

As a matter of course, when my shopping basket is brimming and the person behind is carrying only a couple of items, I routinely invite them to step ahead of me in the checkout lane. It’s the mannerly way and I’m glad for the times when the roles are reversed and the offer is reciprocated. But last Saturday night, while waiting for a table at a popular restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, with a first-come-first-serve policy, I allowed three elderly couples who arrived after me to be seated first. It seemed like the right thing to do, until I realised I was about to faint from hunger. And then I spoke up.

Nouf Al-Qasimi is an Emirati food analyst who cooks and writes in New Mexico