Rant 05: My Horrible Restaurant Experience

Howdy ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another installment in my blogging rants and today’s subject will be on the horrible experience I had at an Italian restaurant the other night.

As it says in the title of this post I had a horrible time in a restaurant the horrible day, it was incredible, ridiculous and unnecessary. Never before have I had such a bad experience in any restaurant in my life! Anyway, let me go back to the start of things and explain how my night went from brilliant to horrible in the space of 2 hours.

So check it out, my mate Ela wanted to meet up with me and our other college friends before she went off to Barcelona, so the other night we all met up in town and decided we wanted to go out and eat somewhere fancy. However some of the guys were being picky about where they wanted to eat, but then it was suggest we go to a Greek restaurant, but when we got there that place was closed, though across the road we saw an Italian restaurant and decided to try our luck in there.

Italian food, can’t go wrong right?

So we step inside and it’s all nice, cozy and pretty-looking and very surprising because on the outside it doesn’t look as fancy. The host is pretty charismatic and funny, he got the drinks for our table pretty quickly and he moved around the restaurant a lot when more people came in. Then me and my mates clocked on, he was not only the host, but he was the only waiter in the restaurant (it’s no wonder there was a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window). Me and mates were literally just having a great time catching up and taking pictures, but some us were getting pretty darn hungry (me especially). Luckily the starters showed up and they were actually really good, but we destroyed the starters in a matter of minutes so most us were ready for our main courses… Only problem was that it was gonna take a long time to get to us.

Waiting for food, it is no laughing matter.

I’m not sure when we specifically ordered our food but the thing is after 30 minutes we were starting to get a little irritable and after around an hour even the people on the table behind us asked if we had received our food yet as they hadn’t gotten their food either. It was at this point when we started to get annoyed with the service and wanted to ask what the deal was, so my mate asked the host why the food was taking so long and the man replied “What would you like me to do about it?” And mate said that he should try to speed up our food in the kitchen and then the host/waiter said he’d try and by that point you could see him getting a little agitated with us, not that we cared because we were bloody hungry. Unfortunately the pain only ascended.

By hour and a half mark I was suffering and so were my friends. One of my mates wanted to leave and at one point I was gonna leave with her. A few of us reckoned we could have gone to several other places and gotten food so much faster than we could have in that restaurant. A little while later my mate asked the host/waiter again about our food and as he walked by our table he literally said “It’s coming.” But the waiting was killing me, I was so totally gonna leave. I was rocking forward and backward and stabbing the table with my fork. I was freaking out without my food. Ela kept trying to keep some us calm and told us to stay when we kept saying we gonna leave. But what really drove me to the point of insanity was that the people who came in after us were starting to get their food before us and I was just so ready to blow up, I felt a fusion of anger, confusion and depression. Me and my mates were asking each other what we ordered and thought that it really wouldn’t take that long to make some of those main dishes. I mean two of my mates were waiting for pasta dishes, PASTA DISHES! PASTA DOES NOT TAKE TWO HOURS TO MAKE!

At one point my mate asked the host/waiter for the third time where our food was, and the guy said it was ready and my mate was like “Then what are you standing around for? Go and get our food!” And everyone started laughing, me especially. It was that moment that saved me from being completely depressed in that restaurant, I was still hungry, but I was well happy about what my mate said. Eventually and I mean EVENTUALLY our food did show up after the two-hour mark. Some of the food was good, but mine specifically wasn’t worth the wait. I was just annoyed that it took forever.

Making someone wait for food when they’re hungry is not a good thing to do. It makes them crazy and unstable! No joke.

In the end that was the worst experience I had ever had in any restaurant ever. I had only seen customer service and food-waiting that bad on TV like when I was watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA (great show by the way), but now I know the pain from the customer side of things. It was ridiculous how short-staffed the place was, I only saw two people in the kitchen and there was only ONE waiter! Which was tragic, then add the two-hour wait for our food along with the horrible service we got from the host/waiter guy and that was a recipe for a bad restaurant experience. The food wasn’t bad, but it took too damn long and I will not be returning there anytime soon.

At the end of the day you should never have to wait for your food, if your food takes an hour to get to you, leave beforehand and find somewhere better.

Thanks for reading my rant. Later on! 😀