Complaining in a restaurant can be a daunting prospect. But help is at hand. Here is our guide to dealing with your very own kitchen nightmare. By Alex Larman
I still shudder remembering the worst meal I ever had. It was in a swanky new London brasserie, which had been hyped to the skies. The experience was like being in a car crash, but less entertaining. The service was surly, the atmosphere an uncomfortable mix of pretentious and grubby and the food was abysmal. The lowlight was the main course consisting of a boot-camp tough T-bone steak, marinated in a blue cheese sauce that tasted of old socks, all topped off with a duck egg. Yet when it came to the end of the evening, to my shame, I paid up without complaining. It shut down within a month of my visit; scant consolation.
Even the famously forthright Janet Street Porter admitted on 'The F Word' that she dislikes the potential humiliation of having to explain to someone, often with English as a second or even third language, precisely what was wrong with her restaurant experience. A survey by the website www.eatanddrink.co.uk revealed that 38% of people asked would never complain, regardless how bad the experience was.
There are times when complaining is a justified option. If the food is overcooked, undercooked, cold when it should be hot or vice versa, bearing no relation to what has been ordered or a pathetically minuscule serving, the waiter should be politely but firmly informed, when the food is served.
It's a traditional fear that if you complain and ask for a meal to be re-cooked or re-served the replacement dish will be manhandled in some horrible way before it reaches the table again. While this is possibly the case in some very low-quality establishments, in most places this won't happen. Amusing though it might be to urinate in a customer's soup, the chance of exposure, and with it immediate sacking and some horrendous fines, make it unlikely.
