One of the nice pleasures of eating out in D.C. is the likely happenstance that your waiter has probably served a table with deaf people before. So you’re safe. You don’t have to work on “educating” the waiter or just mumble along, pretending to understand the specials and instead go straight to the entree menu.

And if you’re the waiter’s first deaf patron, no matter. DC waiters are so well-seasoned by the vibrant international flavor here that they shouldn’t be fazed at all, right? Worse comes to worse, you can just point to the thing you want on the menu.

Not last night. I went with a group to Lauriol Plaza for a nice dinner and margaritas. The five of us were shown to a table that had place settings for eight or nine people. It was such a weirdly-constructed table that we needed a few minutes to orient ourselves and figure out who got the bench and who got the chairs.

And as soon as we were pulling the napkins across our laps, our spiky-blonde waiter was hovering over us, beaming with enthusiasm. Never mind that we hadn’t even placed a finger on our menus.

He said something at about 100 words per second. One of us managed to squeak out “A Diet Coke, please.” The rest of us wanted margaritas and normally, that involves looking at the margarita menu first. But our waiter was not to be denied his drink order. After several awkward pauses and aborted attempts at communication, we shooed him away and told him to come back in a few minutes.

And like the proud, faithful waiter he is, he did return. The only problem was that our faces were buried in the menus, so we had no idea how long he had been standing there before one of us noticed. But who cared - he looked so happy to be in our presence that he probably didn’t mind waiting for a bit.

We ordered our frozen margaritas (via the aforementioned point-at-the-menu method) and then he said something, again at the absurdly quick pace. You know those CSD VRS commercials where the guy’s sitting there with his tie flying off? That’s how we felt.

We were absolutely flummoxed. We could not understand a word he was saying, much less how many words he was saying. Maybe he was trying out his Mandarin Chinese skills in honor of the Lunar Near Year? Recognizing the fluency gap, he seized upon whoever appeared to be the “most hearing” of our group, and desperately communicated his message. Se habla ingles?

Finally, one of us made the International “I’m-Deaf,-So-Write-It-Down!” Gesture. This particular message was not lost on him. He took out his waiter’s pad and wrote down something, and turned it around to show us.

“Salt?”

Oh boy. To skip to the end of the story, we got our meals, which were all right. We recommend the La Loma/La Lomita/La Lomitas Dos restaurant family instead. But a couple of us were boiling at the waiter’s astonishing incompetence in dealing with deaf customers.

So I took it upon myself to write down a list of instructions on the back of one of the receipts. Let me repeat them for you to the best of my recollection:

“When serving a table with deaf people, it is a good idea to remember the following:

1. Speak slower.
2. Tap one of us when you approach the table; it’s okay.
3. Write things down.
4. Often, we’re just pretending to understand, so make sure we actually understand.
   

Thanks for a great meal!”

Diplomatic, no? I left it on the table for him to read. Hope he took our advice to heart. If we’ve true biz created another deaf-friendly waiter in this great metropolis, I’ll be happy.