I feel horrible about this.

When going out to restaurants, I normally do not like to ask to have a dish prepared any differently than it normally is. It can make things difficult for a busy chef.

We ate a Buca di Beppo last night. We ordered a veal parmesan and string beans. I went against my better judgement and asked for it to be prepared differently.

A lot of times when ordering a dish parmesan style there is too much sauce which makes the meat soggy. We asked that the veal parmesan have the sauce on the side. One person in our party does not like cheese at all. We also asked that one piece not have any cheese put on it. The string beans are normally sauteed in oil. We asked to have them steamed.

Sure enough, things blew up. The dish was prepared incorrectly twice.

After the waitress told us the first time the dish was not prepared the way we asked, I graciously told her it is not a big deal and we will take it.
We never saw it.

The manager came out and took it off our bill.

We also had to worry whether we had an angry chef that doctored our food.

What is the etiquette at a restaurant with asking that a dish be prepared differently?

We will definitely be going back to give the restaurant our business. There is no way Buca won't be coming out ahead dollar wise by comping the dish.

This place?

http://www.bucadibeppo.com/

They have chefs?

Sauce on the side - no problem, normally.
No cheese - usually not a problem. I often ask for less than normal cheese on my enchiladas at chain Mexican restaurants. Never had an issue.
Asking for the beans to be cooked a different way? - Way over the top, in my opinion.

the complaint is sort of funny. this is a chain restaurant, with 50 mains. all almost definitely delivered frozen by a semi, and out of the microwave. today's lunch special is.....noodles in tomato sauce for $6.99. and you want a special prep? go to villa de este. smal place in alexandria. they have a cook on duty.

It totally depends on the restaurant.

At some, if they are assembling the veal parm out of a veal cutlet they cover with sauce and cheese they put into an oven it should be no big deal at all.

At others where the veal parm probably comes as frozen hockey pucks preassembled and just tossed into the oven in a oven proof cardboard dish, well they probably have to scrape the sauce off it.

My guess is you were totally in the wrong kind of restaurant for any special requests.

A surfeit of special requests = DYKWIA

Actually Kraft has chefs... Someone had to come up with the recipe for Velveeta. Go figure. But Seriously my buddy works for them and every time he talks about the chef I laugh. It annoys him but really... even my grand kids can make mac and cheese from scratch.

I remember once stopping for a bite to eat at a roadside joint in Kentucky.
I asked for a cheese sandwich. Specifically just a cheese sandwich because I was getting fed up of sandwiches coming on a plate piled up with all sorts of extraneous crap I didn't want.
Sure enough it came with fries, slaw, gherkin AND a bowl of soup with crackers.
When I asked the waitress why she said it was company policy that they had to serve up everything even if the diner didn't want it and anything not eaten went straight in the pigswill.
This was 20 years ago and I figured then that Americans had a problem with too much food on their plate.

Wow, "Five Easy Pieces" in real life. Useless trivia alert, one of those chicks is Toni Basil of "Mickey" fame

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvXVP5lSF1s

+1

I tried the link bro but this came up.

This video does not exist.

Fixed. Took me awhile, but see those three periods in the original link? Flyertalk kept editing the link because those three letters were an acronym for something it's script filters out.

I changed the link to another of the same scene. Hopefully there is nothing offensive in the random string of characters this time...

Yuyp, that's me.
Although I wouldn't take it out on the waitress. I'd call the manager and put the sarcasm on warp factor.

When my daughter was in college, we always ate one meal here on our visits.
We'd order salad and a pizza.

A couple of months ago, I found myself in ALB, and felt the urge to return to BdB. It was a cold night and I wanted something hot to eat. I ordered the lasagna. Whatever was I thinking. This isn't an Italian restaurant. It's a chain with an Italian name. The lasagna came out have hot and half cold.

Even after re-heating, dinner was awful.