Restaurant Design, Food Delivery, etc.

I posted this in What's Cooking but no one responded...probably the wrong place to post it for discussion. So here it is again, for you to view and comment. I'm so curious about what you think of this restaurant design and other issues I mentioned. Here is the post:

So what do you think of this? We went to the newly rebuilt local steak house last night as I mentioned in the above post. I could not locate the restroom, so asked and was directed down a hall past the kitchen, and a prep bar where the wait staff puts salads on the plates, and places au jus, sour cream, etc. As I walked past them, I noticed some of the ladies did not have on gloves. On my way back past the area, I stood back and watched. One of the ladies was laughing very hard, threw her head down and her hair went forward over the top of the dinner dish she was going to deliver. OMG, what a terrible design for a restaurant, IMHO. Why would they direct bathroom traffic past the kitchen and prep bar? There is only one way there and one way back, so each person is going past twice. The eating utensils were another story. Cheap forks, actually looked used and may have been saved from the fire. My fork actually bent each time as I tried to use the cheap steak knife which had little pointed individual teeth rather than the serrated blade. Food was standard, cowboy meat and potatoes. Iceberg lettuce with blue cheese dressing was cold and fresh, until the butter from the potato melted all over it, and the steak juices ran into it. Yuck! The place was packed, on a Thursday evening, it is several miles out into the country towards the foothills. It seems the locals are very loyal.

[Robin Garr]

It doesn't sound like the kind of place one would be likely to go back to, Karen! You describe to me a place without much pride where they don't mind cutting corners.

As for the bathroom trek through the kitchen, that's kind of funny, but when you think about it, "open kitchens" are all the rage, where diners can sit and get peeks of the chef and crew at work. In the Buca di Beppo chain, arriving diners are even walked through the kitchen (a well-marked, glassed-off path) on their way to the table. In those cases, though, I think it's part of the atmosphere, and the kitchen team probably is mindful of not doing anything too gross where the public can see them.

People cooking or serving food with careless hair etitquette is the one thing that really grosses me out. Martha Stewart used to drive me crazy by constantly brushing back her front sweep between different preparation techniques while cooking to plating her dishes. And, I don't generally sit at a table where I notice the waitresses running their fingers through their hair. I try to ignore it, but it's one of those things like fingernails on chalkboards to me.