Myrrh or less: Should we have fumed about incense in a restaurant?

Recently, my friend and I had lunch at a new local restaurant. We were both aghast (incensed even!) to notice that incense was being burnt while diners were eating. Should we have said something to the waitress?
J.R., Aspendale, Vic

A: Great. Thanks heaps. You stole the best incense pun and now I’m stuck with a whole bunch of lesser incense puns. They’re all going to be pun-gent. They won’t be a patchouli on yours. I’m probably going to hit an all-thyme low. And now I’ll have to stop until I think of some myrrh.

So now that we’ve got that out of the way, on to this: I hate incense. I know the smell is meant to calm you and heal you and awaken your Inner Womb where The Higher Self Dwells, but it just makes my eyes burn and my throat seize up and I want to rip out my sinuses with a crochet hook.

So if I walked into a restaurant that was burning incense, I’d walk straight back out again because there’s no way I’m going to eat food in a place that stinks like the unicycle seat of a hippy busker from Nimbin. But you didn’t walk straight out: you sat in that reeky restaurant and ordered your meals – and once you sit down and commit to a restaurant, you commit to its vibe. You can’t go to a low-lit restaurant and ask them to turn up the lights, or go to a Greek restaurant and ask them to tone down the Greekness, or go to an alfresco restaurant and ask them to build a roof and a minimum of three walls to hold it up.