More musings from Miami...
Still smarting from our adventure with the Sushi Nazi, a smaller group went to an outdoor café for dinner the following night.
The salmon dinner I ordered came with 2 side orders. I asked the waiter if the green beans were cooked in butter, since I can't eat butter. He told me, no they weren’t, so I ordered them. However, when my dinner came out, instead of green beans I had an order of French fries.
I called the waiter over and told him there’d been a mistake. He said, “There’s no mistake. You told me you wanted French fries and you even asked me if the French fries were cooked in butter.”
French fries in butter? Now maybe I’m suffering from culinary impairment, but I have yet to hear of anyone anywhere cooking French fries in butter—let alone that was not what I’d asked for.
To prove his point, the waiter pulled out his pad and showed me that he’d written down French fries. “There! See! I have it right here!”--as if the fact that he wrote down the wrong thing confirmed that that’s what I asked for.
After an argument, he took my entire plate away and 20 minutes later finally brought out a new order of salmon with green beans.
To add insult to injury, the restaurant had a policy that “for our convenience,” automatically added 19% gratuity to all checks—so I couldn’t even express my displeasure with the service with the tip. And, to top it off, the check came with a mini survey that asked me to rate the restaurant on several factors—except that the only choices were from 5 to 10. Since nothing about this restaurant rated anywhere near a 5, and the restaurant already knew what I wanted to eat and how I wanted to tip, it seemed futile to waste time on the survey.
Amazing how this restaurant knew what I wanted more than I did…too bad they got the whole thing wrong from top to bottom.
p.s. I had an absolutely wonderful Miami dining experience at a restaurant called Rare Steak the following night. Both the food and service were exceptional.
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