Business it tough these days!

 We are in a recession. There is a lot of competition and most of all, the consumer is always looking to the next best thing.

 It’s not good enough to have good food.

It’s not good enough to just open your doors and think people will show up.

This is the story of the decline of a neighborhood restaurant.

I think we were all told early in life that we could never take anything for granted, and yet we do. Don’t we? At an early age, we make friends. Then, we assume that we can ignore them for a day or two and go play with the new  kid in the neighborhood and our original friends will be sitting around and waiting for us to come back to them. When they go find a new friend our feelings our hurt. We took the friendship for granted. It seems that happens a lot in business.

Once upon a time a restaurant opens in a neighborhood and they serve good food at a good price.  They put their heart and sole into the place, and people come. They pack the house, day and night, for years. The owners know most of the regulars by name. The restaurant gets written up in local newspapers and magazines and life is good. It is a dream come true for the owners.

Enjoying the fruits of their labor, the owners, spend less and less time in the restaurant passing the torch to their now, well trained staffs. As time passes, and the economy grows, more restaurants quietly open in the town, and the customer base slowly spreads out, and revenues slowly slide. Without notice, the business starts to decline.

Why did business decline? Your staff is trained, but guess what? When the cat’s away, the mice will play. You didn’t hire a master chef or a trained executive to direct the dining room. Your manager is your cousin’s neighbor from childhood with no prior experience and your chef is not a chef but a guy who can cook because you taught him to cook. It’s not their business, it is a job for them.

Your manager doesn’t greet customers like family. Service has lost its luster. The kitchen isn’t moving quite as rhythmically. Is that dust on the windowsills? The servers and bartenders chat, a lot. No one cleans the bathrooms, until you are due to visit, if someone remembers.

What do most restaurants  do when business is slow? They cut costs.

OK, conveniently the recession hits and business is down and it’s time to evaluate what to do next to fix the business. No one will notice using lower quality ingredients, see through toilet paper, a skeleton crew in the front of the house or in the kitchen. Guess again!

The restaurants I am referring to have been established for many years and therefore are generally owned by, (cough), a more mature person. They are usually set in their ways and are not amenable to change, hence the reason they are in this position! It is difficult for them to assess what has caused the downtrend except for the economy. Their food is good.

So, here we are in a restaurant that has no staff so service is slow, although there is no one else here. There is dust on the shelves and windowsills because there is no staff to clean it. The bathrooms are dirty because there is no one to clean them. The menus are crusted with food, dried tomato sauce and I don’t even want to know what else!

At this point, we want to leave. There is no one else here. The place is disgusting. My once favorite place in town has gone from being  the pinnacle of Italian Cuisine in our area, to a place I felt embarrassed to be sitting in with friends. I wasn’t sure if I felt more embarrassed for myself or the owner at this point. I’m not sure why, but we decided to stay. Maybe my friends felt sorry for all of us, collectively.

The food was still good, and that was the saddest part. The food was not the reason for the decline. What the owner does not realize is that the large garish signs on the door promoting coupons and online promotions that are “dumbing down” his once pristine business will not save him, but further hasten his demise.

You built your business  on quality and service, not gimmicks.

 Why do you believe that gimmicks, not quality and service will save your business now?

Am I wrong? It was my understanding the servers in restaurants worked for tips. It was also my understanding that restaurants, at least most of the  “non-attitude as a theme” places, survived not just on food, but on customer service. Most people want to enjoy their dining experience regardless of how casual the environment may be. Is this correct? Am I crazy?

Why then do I find myself gushing over someone when they offer exemplery service? It is as if they are doing me the favor of a lifetime! Of course, it is expected at our finest restaurants, so it is not  surprising in that environment.

Seriously though, I have found myself walking out of a coffee shop, deli or anywhere for that matter beaming with delight if someone is exceptionally pleasant. Has this happened to you? What is this world coming to, I ask you?

Here’s the other trap we have recently found ourselves falling into fairly often. Since the standard tip has become 20% for good service, if we receive excellent service in an average restaurant, we find ourselves leaving far above 20%! What has happened is that when we get the service we deserve, and should receive ALL of the time, we are now overpaying for it with such extortionate gratuites.

Trust me, I was in the restaurant business for many years myself. I am not saying that great service does not deserve a great tip, or that when someone has extraordinary circumstances to overcome in order to provide said great service, that extra gratuity is not warranted. My point is that just bringing extra napkins with the buffalo wings and refilling drinks without being asked should not evoke a 25% or even 30% gratuity and yet, it does. That’s a lot of cash and it adds up quickly.

So, what set me off on this tangent this week? Funny you should ask….

So much to say, so little time! We begin with a casual pub, in an unfamiliar town, that appears to be overflowing with people and seems to be the source of the delightful aromas waffing through the air. Okay, so the interior was pure dive bar, but hey, there are plenty of great places that are dives, right? Okay, so the waitress (is that a politically incorrect term now? She really cannot be elevated to “server,” sorry.) is a fright. Yes, I said a fright, just like Linsay Lohan in the Parent Trap with the British accent and all! But, we were fine with all of that because, afterall, she took our drink order within a few minutes.

I wish I knew how to have the Jeapordy theme music play now….

becauuuseee that’s what it felt like waiting for those drinks to arrive! Brutal. By the way, the overflow of people that we saw, and heard upon arrival were from upstairs where a band was playing and food was not being served. Downstairs, where we were seated, there were 3 other tables eating dinner.

The drinks arrive and we are ready to order. NOPE! She’s gone. Oh good…

When she finally returns, after our 1st beers are nearly drained, we proceed to order. My spouse: “I’ll have the…” NOPE! “We’re out of that.” OK. “Then I’ll have the…” NOPE! “We’re out of that too, in fact, we don’t have x, y or z……either.” OK

Finally there was a menu option available. He ordered an appetizer and his entree. Our two other dinner companions ordered and when it was my turn, I ordered wings and a burger. Not too difficult.

This is where I need the music again…

It was a Saturday night and college football was on every possible station, and yet, on the 4 large TVs, was woman’s volleyball. OK. One of our crew decides to do something about this since we have an 80″ screen near us and no one else is seated in the vicinity. As he approaches the TV, he stops to ask our waitress if it is okay to change the channel. She SNAPS at him, “Do whatever you want!” OK. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, she did have two other tables to take care of….

More music please…

Where the hell are those appetizers? Weird that they haven’t arrived because one member of our party has received her chips and salsa, which we have now all devoured, since the music is still playing in our heads waiting for our food. What’s that you ask? Did we flag her down and ask where the food was and why it was taking so long? Well, as large as she might have been, she was barely visible as she flew past our table on occasion.

I knew what was happening at this point. Yep, you guessed it! Here she finally comes with everything at once. So, I say to her, “We would have liked the appetizers first.” Can you guess her reply? Can you? Huh?

“You didn’t say that.”

OK.

So, here are my many issues. How can you own a restaurant and think it is acceptable to be out of half of your menu items at 7PM on a Saturday night? How can you own a restaurant and have an absolute train wreck in the front of the house as the person that represents you to your guests? How can you be a waitress and be rude to your guests when you are working for tips? And the biggest one of all, how can you be a waitress and not understand that appetizers are served before entrees?

Really?

Now here’s the big dilemma and we need you to weigh in on this! When you have bad service you should not leave a great tip, correct? Correct. So, lets just say you leave 10%. Does that really show that the service was bad or does it simply make you look cheap and uneducated on gratuity etiquette? Are you better off leaving the symbolic penny? If you believe so, do you have the guts to actually do it?

I didn’t pay the bill that night, but was told that we left just under 10% or $9 and change on a $111.00 check. I have had this nagging feeling ever since that train wreck girl just thought we were cheap!

If this is your first Rant, please see last week’s entry for a full explanation of its origin. It may or may not be necessary. Truth be told, I am just trying to impress with my new, learned talent of link creation! Not to worry, I will bore myself soon enough, but for the moment it is all new to me!

This week’s rant addresses the issue of the large party. I think you know what I am talking about….

Excited for an evening out “on the town,” you race home from work on a Friday evening, or a late afternoon soccer game on a Saturday, to dress like a crazy lunatic and then fight the traffic into the city for your coveted 7:30 reservation at a place you’ve been dying to try. You finally reach your table, are handed a menu and a promise of a wonderful evening so attainable now, that you can feel it in your bones. You let out a sigh of relief and settle in to decide on your drink for the evening.  For this, uh humm, very real example, we’ll say you decide on Sangria.

The drinks take a long time time to appear. In fact, although the restaurant is surprisingly empty, the server has disappeared altogether.  Hmmmm….

Then it hits you like the proverbial lead balloon……….the large party!

————————————————————————————————————-

Let me break this down for you. It’s restaurant week, and while I am usually not a fan of reviewing a restaurant during this period of time, for several reasons. I still live by my life long motto: Girl’s Gotta Eat!

Needless to say, expectations are slightly lower for most of us during restaurant week. Restaurants are crowded and generally not serving their normal menus. This was not the case in this situation! I enter the restaurant to meet friends and am actually shocked to find this popular restaurant right in the heart of “the city” completely empty with the exception of a few people at the bar and a couple nuzzled in the corner. Behind a beaded curtain is a large private party of approximately 20 people.

I join my friends and we each order drinks; Sangria, White Cosmos, and a beer. The drinks straggle in, one after the other, as if each has been ordered individually. The server is very pleasant and leaves menus. Of course I am aware that it is restaurant week, but if my friends didn’t tell me that this was a “participating” restaurant, how would I know? What were the rules? Our server never explained until 10 minutes later when she reappeared to take the orders. They were offering a wonderful deal, actually. For $35, they offered one each, appetizer, soup or salad, entree and dessert from their regular menu.

That would be great, except that for the fact that 4 people were dining, so that meant 16 dishes were delivered to our table, eventually, and perhaps 6 of them were edible. The tuna tartar was well seasoned, but the crisps served with it were so greasy that grease literally coated my fingertips when I went to pick one up. My Grilled Caesar Salad was not grilled, instead it was an ice cold Caesar, you know, the kind that has been sitting pre-made in the refrigerator all day. My medium rare burger was beyond well done to the point of being burnt. A friend’s salmon was raw. Not medium-rare, my friends, raw! The desserts were not good at all, but the worst culprit was the bread pudding which had been burned beyond recognition. (Unfortunately, my camera battery died before I could get a good picture of that!)

The service was just non-existent all night. There was no option to complain or return the problem dishes because there was no one around. Dishes were delivered and our server was gone before we could look up. It took us a long time, and I guess it was because we were just too busy talking to care, to realize that the large party was the problem.

Long story to get to the point, which is this:

If a restaurant has pre-booked a large party, then they should plan appropriately. It really isn’t that difficult of a concept to figure out. They know in advance that they had 20 people scheduled for dinner. Why were there no other servers scheduled for the dining room during restaurant week? Why would the kitchen be so slammed that they would literally be burning food because of the chaos this party created? What would have happened if the dining room had actually been busy?

Again, if a restaurant is empty, there is usually a good reason for it. I guess we were the last to know in this case….

So, here’s the deal:

We created The Best of Food to promote local restaurants and to help diners find “the best” place to go for whatever they were looking for, whether it be Italian food generally speaking, or great mussels specifically speaking (and we will get specific to that point at another time). Truth be told we were tired of websites getting away with promoting mediocre chains as the best that our great city had to offer. It was impossible to sit by and watch it continue and not try to counter it. While we have some of the country’s most amazing blogs, Foobooz, unbreaded, hollyeats, fries with that shake and meal ticket, (are they a blog? who cares, we love them), we felt a reliable, sincere search engine for restaurants was needed.

Note: These shout-outs are off the top of my head as a rush to deadline. This city has many terrific blogs that we plan to feature over the coming weeks, so please do not be insulted if I did not list your blog here and you happen to be so kind to have stumbled upon this rant!

Because we promote “the best,” you will not find “the worst” on our site, at least not from our point of view. We do not even wish to sell advertising to restaurants that do not care  about what they are serving or how they are serving it. Yet, we still have bad meals and nowhere to funnel that negative experience. So, once a week, we will do that here, in the weekly rant. We will not “name names” as it is not our intention to trash anyone or harm anyone’s businesses, however, maybe we will get our point across or someone will learn something from it. If not, we can at least blow off some steam, and you may feel free to join in!

P.S. If you get really curious about where we’ve eaten, you can pick up clues by following us on twitter.

 The Empty Restaurant

If your restaurant looks like this at Happy Hour, there is a really good chance there is a reason.

Could it be that when a patron enters your empty restaurant that they are not acknowledged for 5 minutes? Maybe it is because that although they are not being acknowledged there is a 2:1 ration of staff to patrons in the room and that is pretty shocking. Or perhaps it is because once the menu is opened the menu immediately yells at you – Buffalo Wings: hot, extra hot, mild, bbq

NO MIXING!!!!!!!!

Well, thankfully mixing won’t be a problem because upon ordering the wings the server announces that anything that is highlighted on the menu in the big blue boxes is not available because they are on a “theater menu.” So, even though there is no one in the entire place, they anticipate being too busy to cook wings? Really?

Things that make you go hmmmmm…..

I won’t even mention that the mussels tasted like the bottom of the ocean, opps too late…