Monday, November 3, 2008

What every happened to good service?

We went out Saturday night for dinner at a little local restaurant that we had "done" breakfast at a few weeks ago.We had found the meal at breakfast excellent, service good and the quaintness of the place charming. Therefore when we had a guest over, we chose to take him there to share what we had found before. What a difference this time! While the place was not crowded, we waited quite awhile for a simple hamburger and french fries. Mine was suppose to be medium rare (charcoal black would be a better description). My daughter's which was ordered as medium was the same but what we found to be particularly disturbing was that we had called ahead to be sure that something could be prepared without garlic (she has a severe allergic reaction to this) and when we asked again on ordering were assured that all food was cooked from scratch and there would be no garlic in it. Just to sure, I ordered mine without so as to not possibly have a mix up. Guess what! Both hamburgers were seasoned with garlic, well overdone and french fries cold(as were the hamburgers).As usual happens, the server came over after a few minutes and asked if everything was alright and when we told her no and complained about the garlic and that my daughter was already feeling the effects from it, she said she hoped we had something with us to contract the effect and moved away from the table. At no time did anyone say they were sorry but I do have to say server did offer to replace meal.
However we did not want to take a chance on something else.While the manager did come over, he also did not apologize although he did send server back to say there would be no bill after telling us that grill doesn't get cleaned between orders and acting as if that shouldn't matter.There was a great deal of indifference toward us and we did not feel that we would be welcomed back in the future.

1 comment:

Maureen Hayes said...

This is so often the case nowadays. I wrote a post on my own blog about the death of customer service

http://beingchronicallyillisapill.blogspot.com/2008/10/death-of-customer-service.html

It is sad that things have become this way. I truly hope at some point they will change, but I am not hopeful.