A fellow Dayorama reader and I went out for dinner last night. A very pleasant restaurant in a hotel, and the food was wonderful… but the service. Oh, the service. The problem was that whilst the waitresses were thoroughly well meaning and cheerful, they weren’t particularly experienced and English wasn’t their first language.

The issues really began when we ordered dessert. Now first, let me digress to the menu. It had little “v’s” next to vegetarian dishes and “n’s” next to dishes containing nuts. The cheese platter indicated that it contained nuts. Now, this isn’t necessarily a misnomer. I mean, you can have cheese with walnuts in it. What was rather confusing though was that the almond tart didn’t appear to contain nuts. Nor did the cake with pistachios in it. Interesting.

To begin, we both had to repeat what we had for dessert, twice – the waitress didn’t quite seem to be able to distinguish between crème brulee and ice cream. We’d had previous problems when we tried to explain we weren’t guests at the hotel, and therefore however many times they asked us for our room number we just didn’t have one. When the waitress delivered the cutlery for desert, she looked puzzled and then gambled saying crème brulee to me (correct) and then gave me a fork and a large spoon. She gave my companion a small spoon, for an almond tartlet. Now, anyone who knew the two desserts would probably think it was logical for the crème brulee to have the teaspoon and the tart to have the fork and large spoon. We swapped the cutlery over.

Then it came to the bill. The puddings were delicious, incidentally. The complication was that we had a 25% discount card. Presented to the waitress, she looked at it as though it was a bizarre creature from Mars. Thankfully, given to her boss, he was slightly less flummoxed and produced our bills. This is where the fun began. We added on a tip and my companion handed over two credit cards. The initial confusion started from producing two cards from one wallet, even though one belonged to me. I’d taken nothing out with me other than a card so had asked him to look after it. Then we said we wanted to split the bill 50:50. The waitress came back with two bills, without the tip we’d previously added. The bill could actually have been split 50:50, but instead I ended up with a bill for £X.19 and the other bill was for £X.17. Why they weren’t both £X.18 is beyond me. In my usual dizzy state, and also under the influence of a good bottle of red, I couldn’t add up and was told to add £X.71 to mine to make it to a round number. Now, think about this: 71 + 19 is 90. Not 100. Two Oxford degrees and impossible to add to 100. So my total was incorrect and the bills had to be returned. Again. Then one of the cards was refused (not mine, incidentally :o) but seeing as the person in question earns over double my salary, somehow I think this could have been the card, rather than the lack of funds). Anyway, somehow and approximately 30mins after we’d originally asked for the bill, we managed to pay and left. Good job we weren’t in any form of hurry. I’m seeing Ollie for dinner later. I hate to think what is going to happen.