complaint letter

To the management,

I do not write complaint letters often, in fact the last one I written was more than 10 years ago, so if you look at it this way, this is a very serious case that I’m highlighting to your concern.

We, a group of 4 customers arrived at your restaurant at 6.55pm on the 28/07/2007 Saturday, with the intention of having dinner at your restaurant and catch the spectacular display of NDP fireworks at the same time. We were guided to a table for 4, situated on the 2nd floor, close to the inner edge of the foyer. My friends and I ordered our dishes at around 7.05pm. That was fine – the captain took the orders, everything went rather smoothly. At around 7.10pm, another friend of mine joined our table. An additional chair was provided for her, but that’s about it. The cutlery, dinner plate, napkins, glasses were not given. That was ok too. We simply ask the waitress to set up the table setting. In the meanwhile, my friend ordered her dishes – that was at 7.15pm (or earlier, I’m giving a lot of leeway). The waitress gave my friend the standard setting minus the napkin and water glass. So we called the waitress again. Three times in fact, then the ice water came, followed by the napkin. “OK,” I thought, maybe you guys are really busy (with what I really do not know, the 2nd floor is definitely not understaffed that night, but maybe everyone is having amnesia because its NDP full dress rehearsal).

We ordered calamari and the mushroom, 5 pastas for the 5 of us. The first dish that came – the mushroom – was wrong. The waitress gave us a salad and intro the dish as the mushroom. How do I know it’s a salad? There’s basically no mushroom, and I’m not that blind. Calamari was ok. So your girl took the salad, gave us black face and the irritated look, and went back to the kitchen to get us the mushroom. No apologies given. Never mind. She came back with the mushroom, and a sausage pasta for one of my friend. That was around 7.35pm.

After which, the fireworks came and went. The calamari and mushrooms were long gone by then and my friend had finished her pasta. That was already past 8pm. My question to you Sir, how long does it take to cook pasta? 1 hour? Or you need a few days to prepare? None of the staff actually bothered to come over to ask us if our food has arrived, or are there any outstanding orders, or if they are decently trained – they could come and ask if we wanted dessert or coffee. I didn’t see any of that. Your restaurant is reputable, and the service standard is horrific.

So we had no choice but to call your staff for assistance. Every time the staff (we talked to a few girls) would tell us they will get back to us, none came back. So we told a girl that if the pasta is not served within 10 minutes, we’ll cancel it. She didn’t come back. Finally, a plump Indian captain or asst manager dressed in black came over and asked us “may I know what you’ve ordered.” That is basically saying that you’ve lost my order and require us to reiterate what we ordered an hour ago back to you and you’re going to cook the pasta after the customer has died of hunger. My friend asked him if he’s going to cook it now and he said yes. That is ridiculous. We waited an hour for nothing, and I can imagine if we didn’t voice out our concerns, we would have waited till the cows come home and you guys close shop and still none of the pastas would appear, because somehow, you guys managed to lose our orders!

So he went off and in his own words, he said “I will make it up to you”, and he left, leaving us a tad irritated and confused. It was a waste of time. Finally we got hold of the manager on duty, an Indian chap I believe whom we highlighted the whole issue to. He gave all sorts of excuses – ranging from kitchen cock up to no enough staff, to saying that you guys expected a large crowd tonight because of the fireworks etc. And I never heard a word of sorry or any form of apologies whatsoever from the manager. He was not apologetic for what happened on your part but was playing the blame game.

So how? Sack the whole kitchen? Or the manager? Or who? Or you? It was a terrible experience because everything took ages to resolve, and nothing was resolved. I can sum up the bad experiences below:

1. Rude waitress
2. Unapologetic team
3. Your entire team is trained to blame others for their faults
4. Nonchalant staff who just can’t be bothered with the customer
5. Lengthy processing time and response time
6. Unable to deliver what you promised – like “I’ll get back to you” and it never materialize
7. Irresponsible kitchen who have a tendency to misplace orders

Would you agree with me that for your restaurant’s service standard, one would expect our food to be served together, so that each and everyone of the customers can enjoy a meal together and not having to wait and wait and wait forever.

In all the restaurants I went to – be it cheap, fast food outlets or so called fine dining restaurants, I’ve never seen such finger pointing before. Once the damage is done, its done. Just apologize, solve the problem and make the customer happy. Not blame here and there and point fingers and do stupid things like making the customer wait and wait. If I wasn’t Singaporean, I would have stood up and left and not foot a single cent of the bill that night. I have consumer rights too and could have blown this whole thing out of proportion by going to the press.

So here I ask, could you please kindly find out what exactly happen that night, and let us know the steps that you’ve taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Timothy