Slow Service At An Italian Restaurant

Saturday, my family and I went to an Italian restaurant run by a national chain. We were seated promptly and the restaurant was fairly busy, but not overly busy. We were greeted by our waitress and a trainee and we placed our order for their pasta special which essential meant it was to be unlimited pasta, unlimited salad or soup and unlimited breadsticks. Great! Well, it would have been had it not been for some bad service.

Besides our entree order, we also ordered flavored ice tea drinks. It took about 15 minutes for our drinks to be brought out... not by our waitress, but by the trainee. She mumbled something about our waitress having some kind of accident in the kitchen, but did not elaborate. 10 more minutes went by and we still had not been served breadsticks or salads.

We watched as other waiters and waitresses brought out salads and breadsticks to other tables. Then we watched them bring out entrees as well. Not once did someone stop by to ask if we had been taken care of. In fact we even saw them taking dishes away because the other tables had finished already! Well, we had enough of the wait, so I got up and asked another waiter to get the manager.

As I was standing at our table waiting for the manager to arrive, our waitress and the trainee came to our table with the the salads and soup, and at the same time, the manager arrived as well. I explained to him that we had been there for 25 minutes without service and that we had waited long enough and were leaving. He apologized profusely, and mentioned that the waitress had an accident in the kitchen, but understood why we were still dissatisfied with the level of service (or lack of service) that we were given.

I told him that the lack of attention to waiting customers was unacceptable and he agreed. While they may have been attending to a problem with an accident in the kitchen, we were still left with no service in the dining area. Upon leaving, the manager gave us a $40 gift card to use at one of their restaurants in the future to make up for the poor service we had received.

While I appreciate the $40 gift card, I still did not feel good about how all this went down. I believe that the manager should have appointed another wait staff member to handle the waitress' tables while she was being attended to so that the paying customers would not simply be left on their own to wonder why they were not getting any service. This could have been done easily and the waitress could have taken as much time as she needed to attend to whatever the accident had done to her while her customers were being taken care of by her coworkers. Instead, her customers had to wait and watch while others were being served.

Hopefully everyone learned a lesson from all this. You can't ignore your customers even if you have an accident in the kitchen. Fill the time gap with another waitstaff member and do it promptly.

That's the way I see it.