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.

19th December 2012

Today has been a slightly lazy day for me. Second of my days off this week so I've made the most of my time by catching up on some lost sleep.

Got out of bed at about 10am, cleaned the fish tank and then fed the cats. We don't have much in for breakfast at the moment so it was jam on toast this morning with a nice milky coffee. The plus side is I get paid tomorrow so I can re-stock on goodies which is nice. I hate the fridges and cupboards being empty so it will be a great feeling seeing those completely full again.

At 2pm, me and Sam had an appointment with the midwife. 25 weeks into the pregnancy now. I forgot to mention that we found out the sex a good 5 weeks ago, we're having a son. He's grown so fast already, and his heart beat is nice and strong which is always reassuring to know. The one thing we're really struggling with is a name for him. We've batted a few names around, checked the baby books and countless websites - we're still 100% stuck. I know we'll reach a decision before he's due though.

After we found out that everything was going fine with the pregnancy, we nipped into town for a  something to eat. It wasn't anything fancy, just a quick McDonalds to offset the hunger. Once satisfied, we made our way home.

Like I said earlier, all in all a pretty lazy day. I just thought I'd slip a post about my life in here at some point. I've covered a lot of news lately and thought it'd be nice to alter the path for just one day. Tomorrow it'll be back to the news.

Thanks for listening!