Restaurant service

Photo: kennethgmorgan.com

At some point in your life, I am sure that you have paid a visit to a restaurant. In fact, I am sure you have visited a restaurant many times. I can also quite confidently assume that 99% of these visits are pleasant ones.

I fit right into this category. Tonight, unfortunately, I experienced service that falls into the other 1% of visits - extremely poor.

We had a table booked for 9PM and turned up promptly. We stood by the typical "please wait to be seated" sign and waited. Waited. Waited, and waited some more - the place wasn't even that busy. 10 minutes of the waiter walking past us multiple times and he finally opened his mouth. "Are you here for the 9PM Valentine's dinner slot?.. we'll just prepare your table, please take a seat". It took the best part of 20 minutes to prepare this table and all it consisted of was a cheap cloth and paper napkins.

Fast forward to ordering, which took a further 15 minutes to produce the waiter. We ordered our food and proceeded to wait again. We requested a jug of water and never received it (we were actually handed a fresh jug from another dining couple because they could see we had clearly been forgotten).

The food was sub-par. I ordered the chicken stuffed with brie and wrapped in parma ham, whilst Sam opted for the carvery. Our meat was tough, vegetables were soggy and I couldn't even taste the brie!

When it came to dessert, we decided to choose our own from the counter which was in the other section of the restaurant. Upon entering this section we saw around 7 other waiting staff hoovering and setting the tables for breakfast, leaving our waiter on his own in the Valentine's room with about 6 other full tables.

We ended up returning to our room at 11PM - a whole 2 hours after our original booking. We don't take that long to eat. If we had been served promptly then we'd have been up and out by 9:45. This meant the rest of our night was unnecessarily cut short. 

Sam is now tucked up nicely in bed and I'm rambling. Just another day at the office.