Eddie’s food frustrations: what if the service is just crap?
Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Usually, that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Eddie’s food frustrations you can read about the latter. This week, we need to talk about the service.
I officially take everything back. Consider this my correction. I know I wrote an entire argument here about how we shouldn’t whine about the service in a restaurant. Because of the staff shortages, the crisis and the blows they took. But it is truly excruciating. Sometimes I literally have to hook my feet around the chair legs to stop myself from getting up and going to help out in a restaurant.
Played marbles with the waiter
At a beach bar, I joked at first that with twice as many half-decent people you at least had a team, but even that theory is starting to fall apart. I went to a restaurant where they proved the opposite. Waiting fifteen minutes to take our order and another ten minutes for the drinks already got things off to a somewhat false start.
Still, I always cover that with the blanket of love from my own hospitality-industry past. But it was mainly the way they talked and behaved, as if I had once played marbles with the waiter. Which is perfectly fine in itself too—I did used to play marbles, after all, if the rest of the evening hadn’t been so toe-curlingly awful.
Sending the waiter back
The most irritating thing about this debacle is that the food was hard not to enjoy. I even wanted more of that bread—which was actually an appetizer—as dessert. The chef jovially called out from the kitchen to ask whether everything was to our liking, but what are you supposed to say? That his food is divine, but the snot-nosed kid bringing it gives the whole experience a bit of an aftertaste?
I have little trouble sending food back when it isn’t satisfactory, but surely I can’t send the waiter back to the kitchen? Although, to be honest, I would have done it immediately if I had even briefly thought it was an option.
From an 8.5 to a 6-minus
But what now? Should we go to restaurants with lower expectations until the industry has recovered from the blow? Will that happen? Or is that top-notch place’s eight-and-a-half simply a six from now on? My hospitality-loving heart is crying in the meantime, because I so badly wanted to find everything perfect that evening. If only for that smiling chef and his thumbs-up.
Read also:
- Eddie’s food frustrations: restaurant turn-offs I’m almost starting to crave
- Eddie’s food frustrations: the supermarket spot check
- These are the 7 gross sins that a great many people are guilty of
