A Restaurant Experience That Left A Bad Taste In Our Mouths
As a young family, I am keen to adopt certain holiday rituals that I hope will eventually build happy memories, especially for my 6-year-old. One of those is the Christmas lunch. We get dressed up, preferably in new clothes because we are Kenyans, and we eat a fancy lunch away from home. Last year, this worked out perfectly. We had booked our lunch at an Italian restaurant in one of our five-star hotels (where I had good experiences previously on client lunches). The restaurant was great. The lunch started with Christmas crackers on our table which had gifts. Nothing fancy really, but they made my daughter’s day. They were followed by a delightful lunch- multiple starters, a lovely main course and a dessert that delighted our senses. At some point “Santa” came by and gave my daughter cookies. She talked about this lunch for days!
So come 2018, we did the sensible thing and booked the same restaurant- my daughter still remembered the lunch. I must admit that I didn’t patronize the restaurant all year but I figured a five-star hotel would have some basic quality control in place.
How wrong I was!
Our first experience with the mediocrity that had become this restaurant was a table that was blocking half the entrance. Here, there was a lady with a register, and another with yellow wristbands – the kind you get at concerts and kids play parks. Apparently, these were to mark the clients that had paid. We found this unnecessary, surely the restaurant had less than 20 tables, marking the names off would work just as well. Anyway, we all got our wristbands and moved on.
The second point of disappointment was the table they had booked us. They had set the table for 2, yet we had paid for 3 people. Seems the 6-year-old was not deserving of a full table setting. After offering to bring a chair to a table that was obviously for 2 (which we protested to), they moved another guest’s reservation and sat us at a table that had been set for three. I tried not to worry about the guest whose table we had just taken.
The worst was however yet to come. The menu was sparse at best. The mini pizzas, the focaccia, the mini cheeses and other little bitings that made up the starters in 2017 were gone. In their place was the usual bread and butter, and one starter item – Salmon……which was not very attractive to the 6 year old but she is a champ, she ate it all.
The 6-year-old getting ready to dig into her salmon starter
This was not all though, the main course was polenta. If you are Kenyan this is a meal you are familiar with – Ugali basically with a bit of a hard crust. We wondered the logic that went into deciding to serve Ugali to Kenyans for Christmas.
She gave the polenta a wide bert. Everyone did.
Finally, the dessert was plentiful but unremarkable. We did not finish it.
Because I am not one to leave without giving feedback, I asked the waiter why they would serve polenta at a Kenyan Christmas. She was just as dismayed as we were. The menu was created by the foreign chef, who did not consult them on the choice of food.
We paid our bills and left, never to come back.
Sadly, this is not unique of Kenyan restaurants. Few restaurants make it to the third year at the same standard as they started with. When you go in for a meal, you are really playing the game of Russian Roulette. Many consumers will give a restaurant a second chance after a bad meal because of their first experience that was good.
We will not be coming back to this restaurant, and while in the past I recommended it for a nice business lunch, I will not be doing so anymore.
The question remains, why do businesses think they can get away with conning customers?
