Lunch #FAIL

Howdy

So after my little crisis on Saturday (Thanks Fancybiscuit to coming to my rescue!) yesterday was very good.

After church we headed over to Cambridge to meet everyone at LB’s House. We headed into the centre of Cambridge to grab some lunch to celebrate LB’s 25th Birthday. We went to the Leisure Park – which is the same bit as the Junction so having never been before I went twice in one week to the same area!

We went to Chiquito’s for lunch, I’d never been before and would have probably preferred Bella Italia or Nandos but it’s LB’s birthday so she gets the choice. We arrived at 2:06pm and was seated at about quarter past – no problem, but then we spent 40 minutes waiting to have our order taken (it had taken between 20 and 30 to actually be handed menus). The restaurant was practically empty so I’m not sure what took so long. When our drink order had been taken the girl who was serving us disappeared behind the bar (which we could see from our table) then a group of her friends arrived and she stopped sorting our drinks to have a chat, we’d already been there nearly an hour so something had to be said.

We ate dinner which I think everyone enjoyed – I ordered a Chiquitos Classico Burger, the burger was fab but I only seemed to get half a portion of chips and seeing at it was past 3pm I was famished by this point!

We decided to have pudding but really wished we hadn’t made the effort now. Me and LB both had a Belgian waffle thing which was fine (£4.49 well worth the money we paid for it), but everyone else round the table were not happy – they’d ordered a sundae which cost more than our waffles but was really not worth the money.

This is what the menu describes the Sundae as:

This is what Chris received (excuse the fact that the whipped cream on top has half disappeared Chris was already tucking into it before I took a picture lol). Kewey and Serena asked for theirs without whipped cream on top so it was even more disappointing for them.

When the bill arrived we’d worked out that it was about £20 a head but that wasn’t worth it given that 5 of the 7 of us hadn’t really got a proper pudding. So I was nominated (I think it came down to that I work in Customer Service therefore I know my way round the conversation lol) to go and speak to the waitress.

So I explain to her that it took ages to be served, took nearly an hour to get a drink and place our order for mains and that the puddings were pretty much two scoops of ice cream and that was expensive for £5. She says “It’s company policy and nothing can be done about it”. Well when you say it’s a sundae and you’ve served us two scoops of ice cream with some sprinkles then that’s probably breaking trading standard laws. As you can see the menus doesn’t specify the number of scoops of ice cream. I’m doing my polite-est nice-est irritated person impression and ask to speak to the manager – she points out that she’s the manager (by this point I am still being polite but she’s getting ruder and ruder as the conversation goes on.)

There is 7 of us and at £20 a head you do the maths – it’s not a cheap meal that’s for sure. So I explain that we’re not happy to pay for all the puddings because there wasn’t £5 worth of ice cream there, she gives us a £10 refund against our meal which was a bit better, she then brings over our change (£7) and has rounded it up to £10 as an additional refund but doesn’t bring us a receipt. We break down the difference between us and as we’re about to leave I ask her for a copy of the receipt. This takes around 10 minutes to organise. The £13 refund was better than nothing but when we were spending nearly £140 on a meal surely all 5 puddings should have been refunded (that would have been £25 in total)

All in all this was a huge fail as the customer service was rubbish. In all honesty it kinda wrecked LB’s birthday – the manager was rude, the food was below par for the price and all in all this was a bad experience and if I’m in the area again I’ll go to one of the other restaurants in that stretch. There’s Bella Italia, Nandos, Subway and Frankie and Benny’s all in a row – I know I’ll be going elsewhere.

I even tweeted during the meal that the customer service was bad – so far I’ve not heard anything back having tweeted them once during the meal and again today while at work to get an email address to send a complaint. At present I am going to write to the head office and to the branch.