Customers and food critics alike have long lamented the shoddy service at Capital Region eateries. Some thought the addition of high-mark restaurants such as Grange and Ella Dining Room & Bar would raise the bar, but it seems that behind those shiny new doors, it’s much of the same old stuff.

“[Restaurants in the area] aren’t paying that much attention to training servers,” says critic and restaurateur Gilbert Lagunas. “Management is thinking, ‘I don’t want to spend money on training because they’re going to leave me.’ But even if [staff] don’t spend that much time with you, that training hasn’t gone to waste.”

Sacramento certainly isn’t claiming to be New York or Chicago, but its paltry service isn’t a regional problem. In a summer article in The Atlantic, Nina and Tim Zagat discussed the nationwide service problem: “Roughly 70 percent of all complaints we receive relate to service. Collectively, complaints about food prices, noise, crowding, smoking and even parking make up only 30 percent.”

However, the service in the Capital Region has been so bad that this section of Comstock’s, At the Table, replaced a former dining critique, Desired Service, because readers and staff grew so weary of the constant complaints.

But in a region that’s patting itself on the back for breaking free of its cow town reputation, one might think we should have made some progress by now.

The bulk of service complaints are directed at inattentive servers, speed of service and rude service, according to the National Restaurant Association. And as world-renowned Chef Charlie Trotter puts it, even the best food can’t make up for bad service.

“They don’t know what the word etiquette means, and they’ve got no manners,” says Lagunas, who recalls witnessing a waitress hit a patron in the nose with his own plate at a Sacramento establishment while serving dishes improperly from the customer’s right side.

“It’s everything from grooming to serving,” Lagunas says. “It’s all about awareness and organization.”

Sacramento restaurant consultant Cleve Geddes agrees that management is largely to blame for the region’s glut of poor servers, hosts and bartenders. He says they shouldn’t be hiring wishy-washy employees in the first place. But the responsibility of the dining community is not past him either.

“Sacramento is a casual environment,” he says. “You can go to Grange and see people in little flip-flops. I am amazed. … And the young people who are serving are dealing with their peers. They’re not thinking that they are also serving people who might have been exposed to better service.

“If the food was great and you like the environment, but you have bad service, you need to say something to the manager,” he says. “Mention it at the door. Follow up, and see if the manager did something about it.”