The way people behave in restaurants – where they have buying power but not ultimate control – can offer significant clues about their personalities. Since a restaurant is a little microcosm of life, you can find out a lot about a person when observing how they interact with staff, experience their food and cope with any occasional hiccups in service.

If you recognise any concerning behaviours when dining out, you might want to think twice about a second date. After all, as Chris Van Dyne, founder of Cosmic Pie Pizza in Santa Fe, New Mexico said, “Restaurants are stress tests. You’ve got time limits, money on the line and the potential for little annoyances everywhere. So if someone’s rude in a restaurant, they’ll be rude in traffic, in arguments and in bed.”

While a restaurant staff endures your bad date for just a couple of hours, you might end up with that person long-term if you don’t pay attention now. Chef Jonathon Scinto warned: “Each of these behaviours is like a preview trailer for a full-length toxic personality you don’t want to co-star with.”

One well-known power play occurs when it’s time to be seated, said Rick Camac, executive director of industry relations at the Institute of Culinary Education’s New York City campus. He’s owned, operated, managed and consulted at 20 restaurants and bars since 2000, so he’s well-versed on the kind of ego tripping that begins before the first course is served.

“One of the worst examples happens when someone with a party of two requests a bigger table, like a four-top, in a clearly very busy restaurant,” Camac said. When it’s obvious that every other couple in the place has been seated at a two-top, it takes a real jerk to insist on special treatment. Demands like that show just how clueless – and power-driven – your date actually is.

Chef Douglas Keane, owner of the Sonoma Michelin-starred restaurant Cyrus and author of the memoir “Culinary Leverage: A Journey Through the Heat,” offered his own observations on power plays when it comes to seating.

“There are certain people who heard somewhere that they should never accept the first table they’re offered,” he observed. “They believe it’s obviously the intention of the restaurant to give the absolute worst table to them, and refusing the table is a sign of being smarter than the staff. It’s usually a sign of insecurity, and it’s funny to watch. We just roll our eyes and give them another table.”

No, we haven’t gone back in time to the 1950s, but yes, this behaviour is still happening, food service professionals said.

“I saw a man cut off his date mid-order, telling the server, ‘She’ll just get a salad with no dressing. Trust me,’” Scinto said. “You could feel her energy change. He made it about control, not care. And that just gets worse over time.”

Incredibly, this is something that front-of-house staff still see quite a lot. Belize Hans Polloso, who now works in tech, managed a high-end restaurant in Miami for four years, and she said that this was the most telling red flag she experienced.

“I once witnessed a man interrupt his girlfriend repeatedly when she tried to order, insisting she’d ‘enjoy the salmon more,’ despite her stating she didn’t eat fish. It signals a controlling personality who prioritises their preferences over their partner’s autonomy.”

When it comes to a classic red-flag-waver, you’ll notice that certain words just aren’t in their vocabulary.

“They never say ‘thank you,’” Scinto said. “They don’t thank the hostess, the person running food, nobody. It’s subtle, but it screams arrogance. If someone can’t give basic human respect to the team bringing their meal to life, they’ll probably struggle with gratitude in relationships, too.

“If they’re rude to staff, it shows how they view people in general,” he added. “I’ve watched a couple sit down and within five minutes, one of them is barking questions like they’re on an episode of ‘Kitchen Nightmares.’ They ask things like, ‘Is the chicken free range?’ or ’Do you know if the chef knows how to make it actually gluten-free?’ But it’s not what they ask so much as how – with a tone of entitlement. When someone talks down to my staff, especially in a place that’s built on warmth and intention, that should be an automatic no-go for their dining partner, too.”

“I think the No. 1 way to get under my skin as a chef is to treat the front of the house staff poorly,” said chef Robert Irvine, owner of Fresh Kitchen by Robert Irvine. “In my restaurants, the staff is unified in trying their best to give the customer a great experience. If that’s falling short for reasons real or imagined, there is no world in which it’s OK to start taking it out on the servers.”

When asked why this behaviour continues to happen, Irvine said, “There’s some combination of spending money and buying into the old myth that ‘the customer is always right’ that can make people think they’re entitled to not just a good meal, but to making the employees jump through various hoops.”

Being overly brusque is one red flag, but being overly familiar is another. Many servers have horror stories of the person who ignored a date completely to flirt with them all night. And if your date starts getting handsy, you really don’t want to hang around to see what happens next. Chef Rossi, owner of New York-based The Raging Skillet and author of the memoir “The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews,” offered up a simple phrase to live by: “Never, ever, touch the staff.”

Chef John Sugimura pointed out the “toxic bitch” tendencies of the rare customer who is never satisfied.

“They’ll criticise and ridicule every aspect of their dining experience. In my head, I’m thinking, ‘Bitch, please!’ I have a lot more customers deserving of my positive energy, so this behaviour is exhausting.”

If you’re wondering which customers this type of behaviour most frequently applies to, Keane spelled it out: “Let’s be perfectly clear — 99.9% of the time it’s a guy being douchey, and it’s all ego- and entitlement-based — definitely not someone you want to date. For that .1% of red flags that remain, it’s a woman who usually pre-gamed a little too much and is just being loud or a little obnoxious. Usually, she’s nothing too hard for our staff to deal with.”

“Intoxication is the most easily observable red flag, and it’s the one that probably comes up the most,” Irvine said. In addition to lapping up too much of the sauce, true jerks can establish themselves in tussles over the wine menu. A common play for the arrogant, Irvine said, is expressing “annoyance that the wine list isn’t sophisticated enough for their tastes. Their arrogance demands that they demonstrate the full depth of their knowledge, so they’ll begin lecturing a server about the proper way to do their job.”

As sommeliers can tell you, the wine list can cause all sorts of ego-related acting out. Camac noted a few things that are likely to have the staff secretly choose your date for the un-coveted title of “guy we can’t wait to see the last of.” Wine-related red flags he noted include “when the date doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of certain wines, but is still trying to come off as an ‘expert,’ when they don’t know how to properly taste good wine or when they send back perfectly good wine.”

Many people in the food service industry have seen firsthand how skinflints can ruin a good server’s night.

“My father was a horrifyingly bad tipper,” Rossi said. “I spent a lot of my young adulthood apologising to waiters. When I got older, I’d reach into my pocket and add $20 to the $5 he’d left, which dad thought was adequate for our family dinner for five.”

These days, Rossi has clear advice for anyone dining in a restaurant: “Unless your waiter is a serial killer, tip them properly. Actually, it might be more important to tip if they are a serial killer, because you don’t want to piss them off.”

“We overheard one guy who left no tip at all, telling his girlfriend, ‘They already get paid,’” Van Dyne said. “She looked horrified, so we slipped her a free dessert.” Another behaviour is one that Van Dyne described as “the classic credit card ghost”: “Someone pulls out their wallet, pretends to reach, then freezes. They leave their dining partner to cover everything.”

Many relationship hurdles need to be cleared when you’re dating someone – meeting up with friends, attending work events or finally meeting the parents. But along the way, you’ll also want to pay attention during coffee dates, casual brunches or fancy nights out, and make sure that your date is treating restaurant staff the way you expect to be treated.

“If you want to know who someone really is, take them to a restaurant and watch, not just what they eat — but how they act,” Scinto said. “Because if they can’t show respect to the people feeding them, they’ll never be able to feed a relationship with the same care.”