Even though my introverted fellows can feel hesitant to ask for food customizations, it’s a common practice for others while dining out or ordering takeout. More picky eaters and people with allergies or dietary restrictions may ask to remove an ingredient or swap it for some other option. 

While those who enjoy a particular topping, sauce, or condiment may ask for extras, and if they are lucky, they get served with delicious compliance.

To find out how food service workers or establishments generally respond to customers requesting food customizations (like asking to remove, swap, or add an ingredient), Bored Panda reached out to Tim Tobitsch, a restaurateur with more than 20 years of hands-on ownership experience and founder of Food Truck Insight. Having spent over two decades in the industry, he knows all the ins and outs about it.

"This primarily depends on the type of service being offered. As a general rule, the faster service is designed to be, the more interruptive it is to take special requests. A food truck operator may have the goal of serving scores of people in an hour just to break even. In this situation, anything that disrupts the operator's efficient assembly line process may be seen with great annoyance," he explained.

However, if a customer is dining in a more expensive place, their requests may be honored more easily, said Tim. "This, of course, may still be limited by what that request is and what cooking and prep methods are required."

But sometimes, no matter the restaurant, the chef's ego might become involved in such a way that they could flat out refuse to alter their culinary masterpieces.

"There is no place for that in my kitchen," said Tim. "It all comes down to attitude first, and the literal feasibility of the request second. If you see guests as an annoyance or their requests as a hindrance to profitability, you are unlikely to consider honoring them. If you see guests as people you have the opportunity to help make whole through the sacred act of sharing food in community, you are likely to be inspired to work with their customization requests whenever possible."

To increase chances of getting food service workers to fulfill a request, customers should be honest and polite, Tim suggested.

"Explain your preference while also noting that you understand it may not be possible for your customization request to be honored. Even if you are a veteran of professional kitchens, keep in mind that you do not know what else is happening in a specific kitchen at the time you place your order," he explained.

"The restaurant might not appear busy, but a large online order or last-minute employee call off may have left the back of the house in the weeds. A server might have inadvertently pressed an incorrect button in their haste to spend time with several tables, all of which are demanding attention at the same time. There are countless unseen variables at play all the time."

A big no-no when asking for food customization is faking having an allergy, said Tim.

"There is nothing worse than a customer who claims to have a food allergy when they clearly do not. Service workers are trained to be familiar with the eight most common allergens and often know more about an allergic condition than the person who purports to have the allergy. That said, there is also nothing worse than a food worker who refuses to take a legitimate allergy seriously. Clearly, if you have a food allergy and share this information, any professional hospitality worker should not see you or your request as difficult."

"The only time it is never appropriate to bring up a potential customization is when you have been preemptively alerted that a specific dish or food vendor will not honor substitutions," he added.

"However, if you notice that a restaurant is particularly busy and your customization request is not a life or death matter, it would certainly be considerate to withhold from making a special request. Muscle memory comes with the repetitive nature of kitchen work, and even when a request is heard and fully processed, a cook's body might take over and make your item as it is presented, the vast majority of the time rather than the different way you have requested," Tim explained.

"Correcting such an error is relatively straightforward in a vacuum, but not so simple when a dozen other tickets are hanging in the window as additional orders continue to come in. If you can enjoy eating a menu item as it comes, consider not making a request if you can imagine that request as likely to break a kitchen's busy workflow."

In case your food customization request isn't fulfilled, Tim recommends maintaining grace. "This does not mean that you need to sit silently and consume incorrectly prepared food, but it does mean that you should continue to be polite, assume there are reasonable factors that account for the error, and simply ask if it can be corrected."