crafty circumlocutions

As part of the new fall associates starting in the office, we go to fancy welcome lunches. To greet my advisee, we went to lunch in an upscale international hotel downtown. Somehow when the appetizers came, instead of the Kobe beef "sliders" that I ordered, a butternut squash soup was placed in front of me. I pointed out to the waiter that this isn't what I ordered, but that the person next to me had ordered and didn't have his soup yet. He shuffled the soup to it's proper place and beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen to see where my burgers were.

Five minutes later he comes out with a bowl of the soup of the day (not even the butternut squash - a cream of celery laced with white truffle oil), and offered up his apologies:

"The chef did prepare your sliders, but regretfully felt that they were not up to his standards and so has declined to serve them. He would like to offer you this soup - complimentary, of course."

Of course, the odds are very long that a seasoned chef (a) doesn't have the recipe for a Kobe beef burger down pat, and (b) even if so, wouldn't send it out to let the customer judge for himself the quality of the preparation. This just looks and smells like a snow job.

The soup was fine, but not great. What grated most here is that I wasn't given the opportunity to ask for anything else. The soup of the day - which I'm sure was selected for me because it involved two seconds of ladling and a quarter second of love from the truffle oil squeeze bottle - was what I wanted least of all off the menu. But because of both the ceremonious presentation of the soup and the fact that I certainly wasn't going to make the poor service the centerpiece of this lunch left me little room to graciously request something - anything - else from the menu.

It drove home for me that what I enjoy most of trying new restaurants isn't that the food is necessarily novel, or innovative, or trendy, or anything else. It's that the staff make a real effort to understand what you, as the customer, want done to make the experience satisfying. This restaurant didn't understand that. They must have assumed that if they gave me something, for free, that it would make everything right. In fact it was the opposite: the lunch was paid for already, I'd much rather have the choice of dishes even if it must be paid for. Or even an earnest explanation of what happened so that I can take the high ground, rather than having it foisted on me.