What do you do if your food isn't hot enough?

Last night, my food wasn't cold, but it wasn't hot. It was as if it weren't heated up enough - but more likely sat there as it waited on the other food. My husband's food was hot. So were my daughter and her husband's.
I don't like the idea of my food - after a bite or two - taken away from me, put in the microwave, then returned to me. I asked for a to go container and told the server, maybe it will taste better when I heat it up at home - hoping it wouldn't make me sick.
The server didn't show an interest.
I guess the next time, give it back to the server, and ask that it be discarded, taken off my check, and I'd share my husband's?
Thanks.

I think when something like the happens, just be really nice about it and explain to the server that your food isn't hot and you would like to know if it can be fixed without microwaving it. As a server i never had a problem with someone saying this (unless they were out for a free meal or something...different story) and i would go ballistic anyway if I saw the kitchen reheating food in the microwave because who wants to bring that out to a guest when youre working for a tip!

Really depends what you are eating, if it's something that cant be reheated easily and would take 20 minutes to get another, I would say you have the right to have it taken off.

You can always ask your server to have the kitchen reheat it while letting the server know it's not a hot as you would prefer it, and pray the joint doesn't use a microwave. You could even say you're willing to wait a few more minutes if they cook it without a microwave. If the restaurant has an oven at 450-500 degrees it should be just a few minutes.
We have a microwave somewhere at zanzabar, but I'm not sure if it works as I've thrown in out the kitchen and told all of the kitchen staff to not even think about using it during dinner service.

As for food temperature preferences that I think is a tricky subject where there are a lot of different views. I personally enjoy my food warm, but anything moving into the hot to very hot range distorts the flavor of the food and destroys taste buds so I always wait for it to cool down to an acceptable temperature. Which is why I've pretty much given up on coffee as it's almost always sold scalding hot, and served in a container meant to maintain that.

We used to have this person come into the Oakroom that always wanted their soup served bubbling hot, and they'd send it back if it wasn't. So we got to the point of throwing their bowl in the convection oven until it was a few hundred degrees and then pouring the soup at boiling point into it as it splashed and sizzled. I never understood how someone could enjoy, let alone eat something so molten. But to each his own,

I was taught that the average human mouth prefers food ranging in temperature from 115-130 degrees (130 seems pretty hot to me!). I guess being nearly 99 degrees in there already, you need a good variance to differentiate between body heat and food heat.

If your food is not heated to your preference (and honestly it really should get to your table about 140 degrees minimum just for food safety reasons), always send it back and ask for a reheat (I've worked in places where we would have to remake the dish from scratch if we sent it out under-heated). I guess you roll the dice on the microwave issue. Food that is not hot enough is equivalent to any other problem you might have with a dish (wrong item, under/over-cooked, etc.)

Hot food cold or cold food hot is a good way to possible food poisoning. I hate to do it, but send it back.

We have a friend who will only eat piping hot food. At one restaurant, when ordering he informed the server that he would only eat food that was extremely hot, and if what he ordered couldn't be served extremely hot let him know and he'd order something else. She brought out food piled high with jalapeno peppers.

That's the best laugh that I've had in a long while! Thank you for sharing, Andrew.