A shambolic meal out last weekend has left lovefood’s Charlotte wondering whether the art of restaurant service has taken a downward turn.
The best...
Sometimes the waiter (or waitress) is the only lasting memory I have of a restaurant. Take a meal out on holiday in Barcelona ten years ago, for example: despite being a fussy family of vegetarians, our waitress was one of the happiest, bubbliest and most welcoming souls I’ve ever met; plus she knew a hell of a lot about food – even the non-meat kind. I can’t remember what restaurant it was, or even its location, but I do know that our waitress was called Pepita, and that my mum has never left such a mouth-wateringly large tip since.
But just as the staff can make your evening, they can also easily break it. To be fair, I’ve had more pleasant experiences than poor ones (I love the informal, overly smiley service now fashionable at hip chains like Dishoom), but last weekend marked the worst example of my life thus far.
...And the worst
It was at a curry house in the East End (too cruel to name it), and we were a large party of 12. Everyone was present and correct by 7:30pm, and the restaurant was bubbling away happily with only a couple of tables empty. It took our waiter a good ten minutes to collect the drinks order, but we excused him on account of the fact that there was only one waiter for every four tables – a point the couple at the next table cited when explaining to the manager why “we can’t possibly wait any longer to be fed,” before abruptly leaving. A disconcerting eavesdrop, when you yourself are yet to order.
Maybe the loss of a cover would help speed things up? Alas, no – we didn’t order any food until 8:15pm, partly because no-one gave us menus to look at. Had it not been for a plucky member of the party, who strode up to the bar and grabbed a wad of menus herself, we’d all still be waiting now. It was at this point that the first panicked glances were exchanged across the table; we all knew that this was our last chance to do a runner, but finding somewhere else on a Saturday night with space for a dozen diners sounded like hard work. So we stayed.
A side of snide
The next offence occurred when it was my turn to order. I asked, rather sweetly, whether the mushroom biryani was definitely veggie-friendly (sometimes curry houses chuck the odd prawn in without telling you), to which came the reply, “of course it is – it’s called a 'm..u..s..h..r..o..o..m biryani', isn’t it?” I felt myself flush with embarrassment, and now regret not sniping back at him with something fabulously witty. But for the sake of the party’s merriment, we all carried on as usual, eagerly anticipating our food.
9:15pm, and the starters finally came out – nearly two hours after sitting down. We were sat in front of licked-clean plates for 15 minutes before they were cleared, and the cutlery was only replaced after loudly asking for more. To cut a tedious night short, it wasn’t until just gone 10pm when the mains came out, by which point I was past the point and tanked up on warm Cobra. This isn’t a food review, but if it were I’d say my side of sloppy vegetable curry was rendered inedible by its lip-pinching levels of salt.
Swaying bellies
There followed a series of yet more incidents to taint the evening – a reluctance to top up our drinks, for example – but by far the worse came at around 11pm, when we were waiting for the bill. The table in front of us had grown rowdier throughout the evening, their bellies filling with booze while they waited (and waited) for food. One of the party stood up, lifted his top up, and drunkenly swayed his bulbous stomach to the tune of a song wailed by a friend, who in turn rushed outside to invite strangers off the street to come in and join the ‘party’.
Surely it is the job of the waiting staff, or their manager, to calm a situation like that down? Of course the blame for putting me off my complimentary After Eight mint lies squarely with the drunken blokes in question, but shouldn’t the staff have done more than just shout a half-hearted “be quiet please” from behind the bar? Maybe I was expecting too much from them… but by that point in the evening, I was too fed up to care.
How about you? Have you got any restaurant service-related stories to share? Is the standard of service getting better or worse, do you think? Talk to us in the comments box below.
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