Bad Service

Altho I whinge a lot here, I'm not a serial complainer in real life (I think) and I can tolerate a lot of things quite well. (Really, trust me!) But today I seriously had a very unpleasant experience at a local restaurant.

To start, I very rarely complain about restaurant service, whenever I see people complaining about services provided in some restaurant review, I always think they are probably just being too picky and unreasonable. For me, if I'm not paying top bucks for a meal, just some basic service will do, not a big fan of being attended all the time, I'd say I'm quite easily pleased with restaurants.

Now, me and a colleague decided to go to a restaurant near my place, heard a lot of people talking about the buffet style menu there, you dine like standard restaurant but pay a per person charge, however food is ordered and then prepared rather than collecting them from hot/cold food bars. The perks are food is freshly cooked and all the sashimi prepared are fresh and tasty.

Great, we arrived at the booked time, stepped into the restaurant, had to stand for a good 5 minutes before anyone actually noticed us existing, then we were allocated to an empty teppanyaki bench although we were not having teppanyaki meals. Well, I didn't mind. Now this is a beauty, some waitress dumped a wine menu between us and just left! This is a bit extreme, normally they ask you if you would like to order any drinks to start, or at least give you some tea! We've decided to order some wine, we picked out a couple of things to start with, filled in the little menu and handed to the waitress and asked for the wine. Without expressing any emotion at all, the waitress put our menu down and said "write the table number and number of people on the order" o...k......the night looks very fun ahead.....

After we filled in the order the correct way, the food came out quite quick, altho I've NEVER been to a Japanese restaurant (this ranges from Nobu to nameless takeaway shop around the corner) where they do not serve wasabi with sushi/sashimi. Busy restaurant, must been forgotten, nevermind, I will just ask a waitress, um, why are all of them seem uninterested to serve you?? On my 3rd attempt to talk to a waitress, she was obviously on her womanly cycle as she even frowned when she was talking to me, and just banged the plate on my side where there's no one sitting and away from the direction I was facing, this was the same for all of the staff, when they come with your food, they were just casually leaving them on your side or shovel the plate between us without even telling you the name of the dish!

Now we are a few dishes into our meals, the drink we ordered was nowhere to been seen, had to talk to the manager to get them. This got the original waitress into trouble, which oddly I didn't feel that bad (a little bad), because we should have got the drinks before we started eating! I haven't been working in a restaurant before, but I know alcohol is one of the most profitable items in a restaurant, so it makes sense to try to get guests to order them and serve them quickly. When we got the drink, seems like it has been diluted with 3 parts water and 2 parts ice.......

The meal went on and pretty much same story repeated, unattentive/rude/zombie staff, and one of the orders got lost and we had to re-order, a few things missing from the order. But the food was quite good, that kind of made up for the service, whooops, I mean the NON-EXISTENCE of service in the place.

When we got the bill, we only tipped them with the few coins in the change, my colleague says "I almost always tip, and I'd feel it's an insult to the restaurant to receive a few 10 cents coins as tips, but I think I was more than generous with them" I totally agree.