If only the fish I ordered today was as good as this one! Lemon, Rosemary, Salt and Seasoning is Welcome – Hair is not!
Today has been a wonderful Sunday off during the fine Labour Day Weekend (in NSW). I am sure like many of you reading this article – 2015 has been a totally flat out year with time off being a relatively rare commodity.
On this Sunday, my Special Other and I went for a drive up to the Central Coast of New South Wales. If you haven’t been there, it’s a place of beauty, scenery, mountains and what I must say is almost perfect weather throughout the whole year.
We travelled up to a place called ‘The Entrance’ which is on a land mass which is exactly that. It’s this great tip of the island full of beaches, great shops and awesome people. There were some great restaurants and some not so great restaurants as well.
We kind of missed breakfast that day (which is really naughty and you shouldn’t do that) to have our first meal being lunch at about 12:30PM. After not being impressed with the local cafe scene we thought we found an awesome Seafood Place to tuck in and enjoy ourselves.
On the surface it looked good, but like a poorly written novel with a great cover – every bit you got into it, it just got that little bit worse. It started with bad service. I mean the girls working there were lovely (and this isn’t aimed at them), but they were not well trained and you could tell (so I blame the owner).
They were slow, unreactive, took ages and we finally got our order in. As time passed (and I mean lots of time), we got a bit more jaded and then the food came.
We were paying Premium Pricing for this and the seafood was ‘average’, but the servings were small. I mean real small. It wasn’t like it was really ‘fine dining’ – it was average pub food served on a nice plate with really bad service.
Both of us were annoyed (more me in particular) and as we ate, we found a very long hair in our food. Gross Out My Friend!
It was the last straw and all my ‘nice points’ were eaten up and after calling over the waitress and saying we had a problem – she just said “Oh Sorry I will get you another one”.
This annoyed me even more, I went in and cancelled it. Very politely – my exact words were “It’s fine, we are kind of grossed out – we are going to finish what we have and leave”.
As this played out, we had one of the managers come out and say “Sorry”. She just said “Sorry” and did nothing about it. Then we had another manager come out and say “Sorry”. He didn’t do us any huge favours, just offer a verbal token, try and blame his staff and then just deduct the bad dish from our bill.
He then took some responsibility and said “I will look into this and really figure out what happened. I am sorry again and I have already spoken to all my staff”.
At this point, I felt much better about things. Previously people were just offering ‘token apologies’ but this man was great, he actually was doing something about it. Sure, I left the restaurant a bit unhappy – but I felt I handled it well.
Part of my (like many) wanted to keep quiet to ‘not offend’ and say nothing. If I didn’t say anything today, I would have had a dish that I didn’t want, left a potential repeating error going in a Seafood Restaurant and probably would have felt diminished for the experience.
If I go back through my life thinking of previous examples, whenever I have not spoken up I when I should – I have always got in trouble. Be it someone walking over me, letting an error continue or even worse – allow an unfair situation to impact something else.
Today reminded me of something quite important – when things aren’t right, we must speak up about it. Be it a hair in your food, or something wrong in society – never let ‘politeness’, ‘political correctness’ or fear hold back your voice.
Unless we speak up, things never change! Today reminded me of that.
Thank you for the read, love your work and be very careful of a certain Seafood Restaurant in ‘The Entrance’. I don’t want to name and shame them publicly, but if you are worried – just message me and I can tell you LOL
Stay Awesome, Keep Smiling and Thanks for the Read!
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