The other day I got halfway through a salad in a local eatery before discovering a soggy piece of blue tissue nestling under a previously rather tasty-looking lettuce leaf.
A year or two before that I remember ordering sausage and mash in a gastro pub and almost breaking my tooth on a rust-tinged enamel chip that had been hiding under the bangers.
On both occasions the staff member I informed about the surprise addition to my meal seemed to think that what I needed wasn't an apology, but instead a detailed theory about exactly how the object in question might have got there.
“Ah, well, you see the salad is delivered in boxes that are lined with blue paper and...”
“The sausages are delivered from the butcher in an enamel bowl and...”
So, for the avoidance of ambiguity, if I'm in your restaurant and I'm unlucky enough to find a foreign body in my salad/sausage/timamisu, there are three things I want you to do, in this order:
- look mortified and apologise profusely, i.e. give me the impression that this is not a regular occurrence
- persuade me that while the object is certainly incongruous, it is nothing to be concerned about (even if this is a lie)
- offer to replace the meal with an alternative for free (and no I don't want exactly the same again — I still can't quite shake the image of the toenail/cotton bug/hypodermic stuck to the underside of a tomato)
I do not want to have to sit there with a half-hungry, half-nauseous feeling in my stomach while you present an intricate theory involving a grassy knoll and the intervention of a hypothetical second chef. I don't want a verbal outline of the yet-to-be-written biography of the object in question, outlining key events and eventually culminating in the final chapter with its appearance in my salad.
Because if, for instance, I lift the bun of my bacon and avocado burger and discover a small but perfectly-formed dog turd sitting proudly on a bed of red onion, my first thought will not be “Ooooh — I wonder how that got there?”
If I'd wanted my food to come with a surprise I'd have bought a Kinder Egg (although I fully realise that “surprise” in this context actually stands for the feeling of mild curiosity quickly replaced by a sense of aching disappointment).
I'm not an unreasonable person. I understand that if I order fish, I might sometimes come across the odd small bone. I appreciate if I pick shellfish off your menu I might encounter a bit of grit now and again. And I also realise that omelette, despite the best efforts of the chef, might very very occasionally contain little fragments of egg shell.
But if the meals emerging from your kitchen regularly look like someone's thrown a handful of random shit from the table of a low-end boot sale into your food preparation area, you should probably get out of the restaurant business and into a job where attention to detail and customer satisfaction are less of a priority.
I hear PC World is hiring...
Spooky... I almost ate a meal at a popular pub chain recently. Two bites in and it was obvious that it had been cooked by an emloyee of the local waste incinerator, and largely to the same recipe. The waiter, when challenged, defended the meal by saying that I had agreed that "everything was OK" by looking vaguely in his direction as the meal was served, which was when he asked "Is everything OK?" Had I known that the question was addressing the quality of the meal, I'd have asked him to wait whilst I sampled the "food" in front of me. So next time you're asked "Is everything OK?" be warned. It's a loaded question!!!