The last two times I have been out to dinner with a group of women friends we have received appallingly bad service. I know that two times isn’t a very comprehensive survey but on reflection I would have to say that I can’t remember a time when I have been out with my girlfriends and received really good service at a good restaurant and we go out to dinner about once every couple of months. We receive really good service ALL THE TIME from the staff at Deli Marco, the cafe my girlfriends and I frequent because of their reliably excellent coffee, and I wonder why this isn’t possible to replicate in the restaurants around town that call themselves Bistros and Dining Rooms and Up Market Restaurants.
I think the reason the good chefs stay in Melbourne and Sydney and away from Canberra is not because Canberra’s dining public don’t appreciate their hard work. It’s because Canberra’s waiting staff are crap. There. I said it. There aren’t any decent waiters in Canberra, and the chefs are sick to their back teeth of having customers stay away because a waiter can’t master the art of taking orders and topping up wine glasses. Who wants to spend hours slaving away in a kitchen only to have the customer remember nothing about the meal but the crappy service?
The first evening out was with four of my mothers-I-met-through-preschool friends. We went to a popular eatery in Braddon. We were given a table right in the middle of the restaurant, and our waiter walked past us about a hundred times during the night without stopping to ask us how our meals were, if we’d like another drink, if we’d like to order some dessert, if we’d like a coffee, if anything. He brought us the menus, brought us our drinks, brought us our meals, and brought us our bill. By the end of the night he realised how incredibly neglectful he’d been because he actually remarked on how seldom he had come to our table during the evening, ha ha I hope you had a nice night anyway, ha ha. Well, at least he noticed. THROUGH HIS COCAINE-FUELLED STUPOR.
It wasn’t until fairly recently that I came to learn about this dirty little secret of the restaurant trade… the staff are high on drugs that keep them ‘focussed’ and ‘energised’ and ‘able to put up with stupid customers’. There was a waiter in my sister’s restaurant who worked very sparodically at her place, and he was usually trippin’ on something or other. One night I went there with my in-laws and he served us, and when I described his manic demeanour to my sister she sighed loudly and said he must have had an extra shot of whatever that night. He didn’t last much longer at their restaurant. But I digress…
The second evening out, last night, was at a restaurant in Ainslie. I was dining with two of the mothers-I-met-at-New-Parents-Group friends and I’d suggested this restaurant on the strength of its reputation for excellent food. Also, I’d been there a couple of times and thought it was pretty good. In fact, last time I went there was with pre-school mums and the service was really good but I put that down to the fact that our waiter was a guy I went to school with and he kept coming back over to chat, at which point he refreshed glasses and offered dessert.
So last night we got there at 7.30pm, though one of our party was about fifteen minutes late. We ordered a round of drinks, some bread ‘for the table’ and a main course each. Bread ‘for the table’ apparently means two slices. The main courses came half an hour later, by which time the glasses were empty, but the waiter had disappeared before we had a chance to ask for refills, and certainly before he had time to offer any. Fifteen minutes after we finished eating, the waiter came back to clear our plates and offer dessert. He returned with the menus, then disappeared again. He never came back.
What’s your stance on attracting the attention of your waiter? Do you even try, prefering instead to stay seated and look hopefully around the restaurant for somebody, anybody to come over? Do you wave an arm about? Do you try to grab them as they go past to another table? Do you call out? Do you, finally, in desperation, get up from your seat and walk across the room to where they are standing, chatting with a colleague, and interrupt their conversation and ask them to do their job?
We had been seated at a table at the far end of the restaurant, hard up against the wall, between two unoccupied tables, and apparently completely hidden from view (or peripheral vision) by the table of eight, the table of two and the table of four in front of us. The waiter couldn’t see us, or couldn’t see past his bigger tables. Our table wasn’t on the way to another table, and wasn’t on the way to the kitchen or even on the way to the toilets. We were on the very edge. Nobody could see us. And, as you can imagine, out of sight means out of mind. We got forgot.
Forty minutes after receiving the dessert menus, we decided it was time to leave. One of us got up to go and find him to ask for the bill. He didn’t express any sort of surprise at suddenly rediscovering us. He simply said sure, he’d bring it. Didn’t ask if we wanted dessert. Didn’t ask if we wanted coffee.
I complained about being charged $6 for two slices of bread. Then I complained about the service. I don’t normally do this. But I was really, really pissed off. If our waiter had come to our table for more than the absolute bare minimum number of times he could get away with (5 times in two hours) he would have sold an extra round of drinks (total of $25) and a round of desserts ($45) and a round of coffees ($12). But I don’t care about how much more money he would have made, I care about how much better the evening would have been.
The manager (I assume he was the manager) listened with little interest when I told him I was unhappy. He offered to charge me only for a small serve of bread (a discount of $2) and then said he wouldn’t charge me for bread at all. He had nothing to say about the service, no excuses about a busy restaurant or an inexperienced staff member. He said he was sorry, so I guess that’s something. But he said ’sorry’ in the way a five year old says sorry. Which is “I’m only saying sorry because clearly that’s what you expect me to say and since you’re so much taller than me I guess I’d better say it.” The manager barely came up to my shoulder.
When we were leaving the manager opened the door for us and smiled in such a friendly manner as he said “good night!” and “thanks for coming!” that I was quite convinced that he didn’t realise I was the same woman that had complained to him five minutes earlier.
I won’t be going back. I realise that I might have just got them on a bad night, but the point is I was upset about the service and the Manager didn’t take my complaints at all seriously. If it was unusual for him to hear a complaint from a customer then I’d like to think that he would have been at least a little shocked and mortified, and would have gone to some effort to ensure I left happy and willing to return. He didn’t, so maybe I was just the latest in a long line of disgruntled patrons and he’d run out of excuses. I feel sorry for the chef and his kitchen staff, actually. The chef has been getting really good reviews. I wonder if he knows how hard the floor staff are working at undermining his good efforts? When you’re paying a premium for the meals (our main courses were between $27 and $31 each) then you expect really good service. I mean, they’re expecting to get tipped, aren’t they?
Maybe I’m paranoid but there seems to be an attitude amongst waiting staff that groups of women aren’t out to dinner for anything more than a gossip and a catch up and maybe a few Cosmopolitans followed by a long-winded discussion about how they shouldn’t, no they really shouldn’t, no they really shouldn’t but they will, just this once, order dessert. So what if we are? We are still paying customers. We still enjoy good food and we still want attentive service. If you carry on with the stereotype of the woman out to dinner with her loud and talkative girlfriends, you might want to assume that she’ll describe her experience to a dozen people before she’s had her first coffee at work on Monday morning.
Ooooh I’m so tempted to name the two restaurants so they’ll turn up in Google searches for restaurant reviews. Nah. I just won’t go back there. It’s not like there aren’t a hundred other restaurants in Canberra eager for business.
Tags: Add new tag, eat (out)
