Customer Service, Good and Bad

I am happy to say that I rarely experience truly bad service in restaurants. Of course, sometimes it takes a little longer than it should to get my food, sometimes a server is inattentive or even surly, and sometimes orders get messed up. It happens. But when I stopped the regular excursions to Denny's of my early 20s, I generally stopped experiencing really horrifically bad service.

Until Wednesday.

The culprit, I'm sad to say, was my beloved Third Avenue Cafe. Neil and I hadn't been out to eat in a while and I was really in the mood to do so. It wasn't just that I didn't feel like shopping for food or cooking; I was really in the mood for the experience of sitting in a restaurant and enjoying a meal. I was also really craving a cheeseburger. Off to Third Avenue we went.

We needed to be in St. Matthews at 7:45, but we got to the restaurant at 6:15 and figured that would give us plenty of time, especially because they weren't at all busy; the place was maybe 1/4 full. We were promptly seated and ordered drinks. They came quickly and Neil and I each ordered cheeseburgers, mine medium-well and his medium-rare. I also ordered tomato soup and Neil ordered coleslaw. Even though I love their fries, I made a conscious decision not to order them, because I'm trying to curtail my fried food intake.

We didn't note the time that we ordered, because, frankly, we weren't expecting it to matter. How long could it take to get two cheeseburgers in a 1/4-full restaurant on a Wednesday night? Suffice it to day, it was no later than 6:30 when we ordered.

So then we waited for our food. And waited and waited and waited. Our server was strangely absent. Eventually she appeared with a complimentary basket of fries "Because it's taking a while." Even though my brain didn't want fries, my belly did, and I was thus appreciative. I would have been more appreciative though if she had told us why it was taking so long or, more importantly, how much longer it would take. But she did not. And then she disappeared again.

We continued to wait. Meanwhile, people who had arrived after we did got their food, ate, and left. Two humble cheeseburgers! What could possible be the problem?!

7:15 came and went. It was becoming clear that we were not going to get our food in time to eat it. Since our server was steadfastly avoiding our table, Neil got up and approached her and told her that we were going to need our food to go, since we were not going to have time to eat. She stared at him blankly and eventually showed some sign of understanding.

And still we waited.

Finally, just as I was asking Neil if he wanted to leave, a man approached our table with our food. He said he was the manager, that they only had one cook that night, that he was very sorry, and that "this kind of thing doesn't happen here." (But guess what! It did!) He said he'd throw in two free desserts for our trouble. At that point we didn't care. We had 15 minutes to get from Old Louisville to St. Matthews. We just wanted our food and our receipt and to get the hell out of there.

We arrived at our appointment with a few minutes to spare and decided to dig into our food while we could. Here we experienced the final insult: our medium-well and medium-rare burgers were both well-done, I had coleslaw instead of soup, and we had no napkins or utensils.

Wow.

Did Third Avenue Cafe try to make this up to us by plying us with free fries and desserts? Indeed they did. But neither of us felt that this was an acceptable way to handle the situation. Instead they could have:

1. Told us up front that they were short-staffed and that the food would take a while.
2. Tell us that the cheeseburgers (for some reason I still cannot fathom) were going to take an especially long time and advise us to order something else (since everyone else in the restaurant seemed to be getting their food in a timely fashion).
3. Assuming that the delay was in fact unforeseen, apologize and give us some reasonable expectation of when our food might arrive.
4. Give us our food on the house.

#4 is what really galls me. I went to Third Avenue specifically because I wanted a nice dinner in a restaurant, and they totally screwed that up for me. I get angry all over again when I think about the fact that we spent $28 on this meal which, when we finally got to eat it, was not even prepared correctly.

Third Avenue Cafe, you break my heart. Every year around this time I get antsy to go sit at one of your sidewalk tables and enjoy a beer and some delicious food. But I don't know if I can forgive you for this. Neil has vowed that he will never return.

:(

On the other end of the spectrum, however, we have an unlikely hero: Starbucks. I have to state up front that I am a big local coffee fan and that Starbucks is not a place I frequent. I have no reason to when there are so many awesome local coffee joints in this city. However, yesterday Neil and I were headed back from a wonderful day at the new Cincinnati Ikea, and we decided to break up that long stretch of I-71 with coffee break. So we stopped at the Starbucks in Florence.

Neil had to go to the bathroom and didn't tell me what he wanted first, so I went ahead and ordered and received my drink. Then Neil came out and ordered his. We chatted for a few minutes while we waited, but it seemed to be taking a little longer than it should have. Neil approached the counter and asked about his drink. Oops! It had somehow fallen through the cracks. It would be right out, they said.

Indeed, the drink was ready just a few minutes later. But instead of just calling it out when it was done, an employee brought it over to our table, apologized again, and handed Neil a voucher for a free drink. They took this relatively minor lapse in service very seriously, and we were duly impressed. Good on Starbucks, but how terribly sad that this corporate giant was more concerned about a few-minute delay on a cup of coffee than a beloved local restaurant was that they ruined our entire dinner.

I never thought I'd say that anyone could take a lesson from Starbucks, but Third Avenue Cafe definitely could.