Advice to Restaurant Owners
We (my officemates and I) have blacklisted two eating places at Robinsons Place Manila as we were not happy with the service they gave us the last time we ate there. Restaurant O (serves Asian food, heavy on Thai food and noodles) and Restaurant T Y (serves good Chinese food, sayang) took so long to serve us our orders and you know what they say about hungry people.
What did the two instances have in common? It took about 30 minutes up to 1 hour for the food to arrive. Continuous follow-ups did not help any. Restaurant O apologized after the fact while Restaurant T Y did not even seem the least bothered. From these occasions, what might restaurant owners learn?
1. Thou shalt hand the customer the menu right away — Customers are in a restaurant to eat. They did not come simply to warm your chairs or to chat the minutes away. In both restaurants, we had to ask for the menu once or twice and sometimes, we really wonder if these restaurants want our business that badly.
2. Thou shalt listen to the customer and look him in the eye — In both cases, we followed up 4 times, 8 times for various things. Our food, saucers, serving spoons, drinks. You name it, we had to follow it up several times. The follow-ups did not make the food come out faster. Both restaurants told us “nakapila na po” (the food is in process and being lined up to be served) and we wondered what they were lining up for. Hindi ipinipila ang pagkain. Inihahain. In a few instances, we had to get some things ourselves (like a spoon) for we realized that if we waited for the waiters or waitresses (who had the unique talent of looking everywhere else but at us), it might take forever.
3. Thou shalt not let in more people than you can serve — Restaurant O said they were undermanned. There weren’t too many people and yet service was so slow. In fact, while we were waiting for our food, another group, at another table just walked out as they were not handed the menu after sitting at their table for a good number of minutes. Restaurant T Y was full but it was a pity that their service was so bad today for in the past, service was decent and the food, always good.
Things got so bad at Restaurant T Y today (I guess we had reached our breaking point because of our previous experience at Restaurant O), that our office mate R literally went to the kitchen and demanded that our food be served! Staff were telling her that our food was “nakapila na” but she asked to know what number we were in the order or priority of things. Three of us got up from our table, determined to leave the place and the food that we ordered (without paying for it of course) and just going to good old reliable Jollibee. As I say, no need to get mad. Just vote with your wallet.
Needless to say, our officemate R’s complaining finally got the food out. Our soup was served, together with our beef with veggies and you can bet the rice and the squid followed swiftly after as R threatened that if we were done with the first two orders and the rest were not yet ready, we would just leave without paying for anything. These restaurants shouldn’t really accept more people into their establishment than they can decently serve. Otherwise, it will really be an O disgrasya and customers will feel that they went to a hin TaYan where service is so Ta Gal.