Again, I keep apologisting for not posting more often and I am doing it again. I’ve been very very busy selling burgers, sausages and other great meat products to our wonderful customers here in Adelaide and all over Australia.
Today, I want to have a rant! I’ve been wanting to have this rant for a long long time now and I’ve decided to bite the bullet with 3 little stories about bad service in restaurants. These are not stories where you have to wait for ages but you know they are trying their best and they are not stories where anyone has blown their nose into a pizza etc (ie like the latest videos on You Tube will show you!). They are stories about food places where people are doing their jobs just very very badly!!
Please feel free to tell me your stories of bad service!
Story 1) Ignorance – I was on a work trip to Sydney, I was in the process of picking up quite a large account there and I was also meeting up with a couple of food bloggers (Helen Yee from Grab Your Fork!) and a multi-media web guy from the company that owns Chow Hound. He wanted to discuss a couple of things and thought it would be great to do it over lunch. So being in Sydney, he took us to a swanky little Italian place quite near Darling harbour. I’m thinking Sydney, seafood and we order from a tall middle-european girl with not much practice speaking english who should have been a model but for some tragic reason was waiting tables. I ordered the Spaghetti Marinara and the others also ordered various pasta dishes.
When the dishes arrived they were cold. Now, we are not talking sitting somewhere and cooled off a little whilst waiting to be served sort of coolish under optimum temperature cold. We are talking around the 2o C mark (ie just above freezing). So I call the ‘Euro-model’ over and explain that our dishes are cold.
‘Cold?’ she asked.
‘Yes, cold’ I reply.
‘What do you mean, cold?’ she asks.
‘I mean only just defrosted’, I reply.
‘You mean, you want it hot?!’, she asks.
All of our jaws dropped in-synch. ‘That’s kind of the idea’, was the reply.
She takes them away, and they come back not 4 minutes later, steaming hot having just been nuked in the microwave. We finished out meal in stunned silence and prayed for the stomach cramps to evade us.
Lesson: Unless it explicitly says, ‘Pasta salad’ on your menu, please serve your pasta dishes hot as it gives away the fact that you are buying in pre-prepared dishes from a catering company and vastly overcharging for it.
Story 2) Rudeness – Just last week I rang up a restaurant on O’Connell Street in North Adelaide to enquire about lunch bookings. So when I ring up, the guy answering the phone answers with, ‘Yeah!’. After asking my questions to which his answers were short and quite gruff, I thanked him for his time to which he just hung up the phone. Needless to say, I didn’t feel like visiting this place.
Lesson: Everybody is your customer, whether they know it or not. Being rude to them ensures that they will make the decision for you.
Story 3) Deceit and insincerity – We were eating at quite a fashionable Italian restaurant on Unley Road in Adelaide. The decor was beautiful and funky and the menu was contemporary up-market Italian. They had a good wine list and there were eight of us all having a great time. The starters and mains on the whole were OK. This was over a year ago and besides the upcoming story on the service, the only thing I remember about the food was the tuna which had a huge raw piece of the blood line left in which tasted incredibly tangy (in a bad way) and metallic.
So after the main course is served, the girl who is serving us and has been coming up with all the insincere comments all nights starts with the whole, ‘…because you are my favourite customers, we are going to give you a real treat tonight…’ crap. We got served a ‘complimentary’ balsamic vinegar sorbet as a palate cleanser. This thing had all the subtlety of a sledge hammer and we were apparently so lucky because we were getting this for free. More like the chef was having a ‘bad chef’ day and made this stuff, thought it was disgusting and gave it out for free because he felt too ashamed to charge for it.
The piece-de-resistance was the finale with the cheese course. On special for that evening was St Agur. In the UK, you can buy this stuff in the supermarket and I really quite like it. In Australia, well, I’ve not seen it in the supermarket and AQIS is a bit funny about bringing stuff from OS with mould in it (we’ve only just got Roquefort back in the last couple of years!!). So after hearing this girl harp on about how special it was, I ordered it (I was going to order it anyway). She comes back 5 minutes later saying how they had just dropped the cheese on the floor and it was now ‘unavailable’. When the other waiter came to the table, he was telling me how great this cheese was. When I remarked to him how disappointed I was that it wasn’t available, he stated to me that it was and that he had just served some to another table at which point the other girl comes, grabs him by the shoulder and starts whispering in his ear. He looks both bemused and puzzled and then sheepishly comes over and repeats what is clearly a lie and that the cheese is actually unavilable. What the real story was, it seems is to be lost forever in time.
Lesson: Your customers and not always as stupid as you think they are and quite often can tell when they are being lied to. Similarly, heaping fake praise on your customers comes off as insincere and disingenuous. Treat people in the way you expect to be treated.
Send me your stories of Bad service!
Regards,
G
Hi, George! Your stories had me shaking my head and giggling a bit…
I was in a Red Lobster a couple of weeks ago and the fire alarm went off no less than 7 times. Yet no one left. LOL
I wanted to also tell you that my cooking blog name has been changed – I added a “the” to it, lol. So – it’s now http://www.thecastironkitchen.blogspot.com
And I’m planning on cooking a quick tortellini recipe that I got from Lee4145 and posting it tonight, if you get a minute – just using refrigerated tortellini, but I’m pumped about it!
See ya on the camel, and here too!
XO
Sis
I was pretty unimpressed when a cocky waiter (here in an Adelaide eatery) SAT DOWN at the table with us to take our order. But my pet hate, removing the plates before everyone at the table has finished…. They should be taught that in Food Service 101.
The real consequence of these poor service scenarios is playing itself out right here: the unhappy customers will tell EVERYONE THEY KNOW (in this case, anyone who will read). One of the best managers I ever had would tell us, “When you kick ass, your customer will tell one other person about it. If you don’t kick ass, your customer will tell TEN other people about it.” With the Internet, your customers will be able to tell thousands, possibly millions of people about it!
i’m actually reminded of a friend who ate in one of the best restaurant in Piedmont, Italy. A veal milanese was served cold. When my friend asked about the abnormal temperature, the service staff responded that it was the way the chef consistently served it, because as a kid, his dad would come home late from work and by that time the veal milanese was cold!
While this raises the nice and fairly talked-about concept of intentionality, and while eating a veal milanese cold IF you understand why it is- may be acceptable, it really looks like the kitchen made an obvious mistake.
So who knows? Maybe the Sidney chef actually intended to serve his pasta dishes cold… on purpose.
Chef Gui Alinat, CEC.
I think I know which place you are talking about in Story 1. I called it ‘place’ because I wouldn’t call it a restaurant.
About 2 years ago, I hosted some international visitors. Lured by the sun and showing off Sydney harbour, I thought we will have quick pasta meal. One of the dishes ordered was the ‘special: chicken pasta with spring veg’ (or something like that). To my embarrassment, the ‘chicken’ were a few mesely clumps of mince chicken and the veg looked like it was from a packet of frozen peas, corn and carrots. It was ‘special’ alright. I kind of mumble something like ‘I’ve only been here one other time.’.
I work in a cafe that is attached to a hotel and in the midst of the lunchtime rush I accidentally answered the phone with a great big “HI!” thinking it was one of the girls calling me from the kitchen. The gentleman on the other end of the phone was quite surprised to say the least! I apologized over the phone and when I took him his room service, and I believe that that is the least I could have done for not checking who was calling.
As for being rude over the phone? No excuses! I would get crucified by my manager if I ever acted like that!