RANTY TANTY

From nasty attitudes to intruding "pubes"...

Bad Food
Bad Attitudes
Bad Stomachs

Enough!

After having recently  written how French restaurants are finally finding the meaning of customer service I find myself on a track running backwards at full throttle!

My colleagues and I often head down to the cafés on the quayside in Bordeaux for a quick lunch. I doubt whether this will continue. Apart from finding the staff in many of these restaurants quite silly strutting around knowingly in their designer aprons without even being able to tell you what the plate of the day is, I am now horrifed by their total lack of manners and personal hygene. 

In one of these particular establishments the client is clearly not " king " but rather a "play thing" to ridicule.

My first bad experience in this café came a couple of weeks back. 
The description "assorted crudities" has never been so close to the truth. Plate slapped down in front of me and there sitting on top of the grated carrot is one enormous greasy long curly hair..my two colleagues and I look down at the sight and beckon over the waitress who slides back and grudgingly takes away my plate. It sits on the service bar for about 5 minutes..we are ALL watching as she trots back up to the very same plate and, with a brisk wrist, whisks away the hair and returns back with the plate to me. We all remark that it is the same plate but she insists it is a new one. It obviously rests uneaten.

I foolishly return to the same establishment last week..I order the plate of the day "Gambas" cooked on the plancha. There are 4 greasy gambas staring up at me. The first one is fine. The second one fills my mouth and throat with what can only be described as an overwhelmingly disgusting ammonia/kerosine taste. 
All " lady who lunches" is lost as I discretely spit it out on my plate, eyes watering!

We summon the waiter to warn him that one of my gambas is "off"..am then transported to mouth gaping shock as he offers to replace the offending gambas ( singular) that I spat out. I had thought he would remove the entire plate. Wisdom tells me not to continue with the rest but I do eat the rice as I was starving and had to teach until 8pm.

When we go to pay I mention that my lunch was pretty much inedible and that the gambas were "off"...at that the waiter yells across the restaurant in true Faulty Towers fashion..." Does anyone know anything about a gambas which was off?? " I then get " I suppose you don't want to pay for your main course"...accompanied by the sniggering of all the other designer waiters.

We walked out completely shell-shocked to have been treated like this.
About 45 minutes later I was shaking, sweating and vomiting. I cannot ever remember being so ill. 24 hours of pre - christmas purging!

The lesson :  do NOT go back for more bad food and rotten customer service. It is simply not worth it!







Comments

  1. and back to France and more bad service!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Note to self: don't go to eat on the quayside when visiting Bordeaux... Being completely rural here most of the restaurants have pretty good service as they rely on locals coming back regularly, that said the one place that prides itself on it's exemplary cooking (they're mistaken too)has some of the most off-hand service I've ever come across. The prize, if you can call it that, for appalling service has to go to many of the bars in Montpellier, I think I've walked out of more of them after an interminable wait for one of the waiters to notice us and take our order than I've actually stayed to have a drink.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @ Victoria...there are actually a few good places where the service IS exemplary and food good. Ticks all the boxes. The bad, surly service is somewhat shocking however and remains pretty common in Bordeaux!
    memo to self, avoid Montpellier!

    ReplyDelete
  4. You must name and shame just in case I end up in there some day!

    ReplyDelete

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