Restaurant Managers Need to Read This

When something happens at lunch at a restaurant and a friend announces to the table, “You are going to see this on the blog tonight,” you can bet what happened was not good.

My friend Jan from Texas is visiting and her best Texas friends, Mark and Mary Jo happen to be here for a wedding so Jan thought it would be a good idea to try and go to Poole’s diner for lunch since I was in Raleigh for a Food Bank meeting. Two other friends Lee and Laura also wanted to go since they had read the blog account of the last time Jan and I went to Poole’s. There was only one glitch in our plan; Poole’s is not open for lunch. You would have thought that one of might have checked.

Since I got there first and discovered our mistake I called Jan and she, Laura and Lee with multiple smart phones searching decided that 18 Seaboard, another highly rated farm to table Raleigh restaurant would do. I weighed in positively and off we went to meet there.

Upon everyone’s arrival to a fairly late lunch we ordered fast, three of us all getting the grilled chicken on salad with beets, blackberries and goat cheese. It was a variation on my standard favorite lunch. The food arrived quickly and without any editorializing from the staff.

A few minutes into eating Mary Jo asked Jan and me if we had any beets in our salad. Careful dissection reveled that no beets were to be found. Now the beets were a major seller of this particular dish since we had already discussed our love of beets before the meal arrived.

You know who furiously worked to get the servers attention, finally having to ask a co-worker to send her over to us. She further examined the salads and declared the beets to be missing. After a few minutes in the kitchen a different young woman came out and introduced herself to us as one of the managers, perhaps even an assistant manager.

“The chef said he did not get beets today so he left them out,” she told us.

“Too bad,” I said. “Since the beets were a major part of the salad we were looking forward to.”

“Is there something else I can get you?” She sheepishly said.

“We don’t know what else you have,” I said leaving the door open for her to give us a list.

“Let me know if there is something I can get you.”

I let the whole thing go at this point. We were having a nice lunch and I had already done my restaurant customer service-training blog for the week.

After we finished the meal the server asked if anyone wanted dessert. Mary Jo and Jan said they’d split the peach cobbler. No mention was made of the apology dessert they were going to be bringing us. But sure enough when the cobbler arrived so did two additional desserts, orange cookies and a blueberry panna cotta with some basil cookies. Lee declared that if they wanted to give us a free dessert she wished they had brought the chocolate cake in a mug.

Yes, being asked what we might want is a better idea than just bringing us something we did not ask for. What I really wish is that restaurants would stop making mistakes but if they do not try and solve it with fattening desserts, which I really don’t need. If someone orders the least caloric thing on the menu then don’t try and pacify her with the most fattening item.

Clearly the chef knew he did not have any beets. Communicating that to the server so she could let people know at time of order is the easiest and best way not to disappoint customers or worse make them write blogs about another bad customer service experience.