Police Called: The Bill Was a Huge Shock for the Guests
I’ve been a ‘victim’ of this myself: a bill that genuinely scares the living daylights out of you. It happened to me recently in Ibiza (although you do kind of expect it there): fourteen euros for a portion of fries, with the mayonnaise costing another two euros. ‘Criminal,’ I said at the time. A group of tourists in Singapore felt exactly the same way and refused to let it slide: the police were called.
Junko Shiba and three friends from Japan ended up at Seafood Paradise, where they ordered the Alaska king crab on the chef’s recommendation. And that literally turned out to be quite an expensive decision.
A ‘seasonal price’
According to the menu, that was what they would have to pay for the dish. And since all the other dishes were around six or seven euros, it couldn’t go too badly. Or so they thought… Converted, they had to fork out 850 euros for that little crab.
‘We were completely stunned. None of us understood that the entire crab would be cooked just for us, since some other restaurants serve crab in portions. There were three plates full of crab and many more dishes; we couldn’t eat everything. We hadn’t ordered that much.’
A little discount was possible
The manager of Seafood Paradise offered a discount—50 euros, and later 70 euros—but Shiba and his friends did not agree, and they couldn’t reach a resolution. That was why the police were called in. Shiba thought he had a very strong case, but the chef told the police that the group really had known this would be an expensive meal. The chef told the police that he had ‘communicated twice that the price of the Alaska king crab was the same as that of the Scottish snow crab, while pointing to the menu’, and that ‘they had even brought the entire live Alaska king crab to the table to show it to them before it went into the pot.’ Shiba denied this emphatically, leaving only one option: bring out the camera footage.
And yes, that was something the group had not counted on. The footage showed them enthusiastically taking photos of the gigantic creature being shown at the table. Ouch. So there was nothing else to do but pay the 850 euros. Without the discount, indeed, because it had been withdrawn by then.
