Kopi talk - Restaurant service the good, the bad and the Ugly

Hi Gabriel sometime we realized that our restaurant business is not about service and food is all about a customers experience of eating in your restaurant. At the end of the day the customer carry along the positive or even the negative experience of eating at your premise . When customers complaining in fact is a wake up call. There is no doubt that excellent customer service is critical to the success of a restaurant. Once you have selected the decor and high quality of menu selections, the staff also play an important role as they are the ultimate in service to your clients. My Dad used to remind us and our waiters that the word TIPS mean " to insure professional service.


Article by Gabriel
One would think that, when eating at a restaurant, the browsing of menus and ordering would be the easy, negligible part, with most of the attention paid to the service and food itself instead. At a restaurant I ate at recently, however, it took me longer to order my dish than to actually finish the dish.

Located at Vivocity, Hong Kong Kim Gary Restaurant looked at first to be a decent offering, with pleasant decor and a large number of people eating in it and a general bustle around the place. Just deciding on something to eat, however, was enough to give me a headache.

Unlike most places which usually offer only one menu (with perhaps additional menus for drinks/desserts and promotional sets), the restaurant had a whole stack of menus, which all confusingly listed not only different foods, but sometimes even repeat the same dishes, which makes the main focus of each of the menus totally unclear.

On top of that, even after you’ve scoured through the various menus and finally picked what you wanted to eat, the order chits on which to write your dishes of choice came in an overwhelming array, with sheets for ala carte dishes, vegetables, drinks, rice sets and several other different categories, many of which don’t even seem mutually exclusive at first glance.
To make matters worse, the food wasn’t great, neither.
The Shanghai noodles with beef and Sichuan vegetables had a lot of MSG and, even then, tasted unremarkable (although the beef was surprisingly tender). The Korean spicy noodles were even worse, tasting like something we could have whipped up ourselves at home (and probably done a better job).
The baked rice dishes, apparently their specialty, were passable but nothing special. The cheese and chicken chop portions were chewy and provided a good feel but the overall taste was somewhat lacking and not worth the $12 it cost.

My friends and I shared a bowl of fries topped with (a very scarce amount of) minced beef sauce which were bland and tasteless and weren’t even the same type as the ones advertised in the menu.
To top off the bad experience, the service staff were inattentive, unfriendly and brusque (even after we had indicated who had ordered a certain dish, they would just set it down on the side of the table nearest to them and leave us to pass the food around) and, seeing as we did practically all the work navigating the scores of menus, didn’t warrant our service charge at all.
Definitely the worst dining experience I’ve had in recent months (although I’ve heard very polarized reviews of this place from different friends so maybe you’d luck out on different days?).

About Gabriel 

Describing himself as cheesy, friends would probably label Gabriel as obsessive-compulsive due to his inexplicable need to arrange everything he sees.
The NP Mass Communication graduate plans to be a child psychologist in the future but is forego a job if someone willingly offers him a billion bucks.In his spare time, Gabriel likes reading and writing. He also enjoys the trifecta of television, movies and music.Most of the time, he unleashes his inner child, watching cartoon marathons and getting lost in the world of video games. Gabriel also loves to eat.