Wednesday, July 9, 2008

He Gets Crabby At Dinner...Our 200th Post!

"Wife: Man who died didn't order crab dish: No criminal charges will be filed"

This one is a hard one to decide. I like Ruby Tuesday Restaurants and have only had good experiences there.

Here's my take on this one: One of 2 things could have happened here. The customer ordered the entree without reading what exactly was in the dish or the server wrote down the wrong entree and keyed it into the order system.

It couldn't be a kitchen error because the food was prepared according to what was printed on the ticket. So it's not like they made the wrong dish. It can't be an expediting error as the correct food, according to the ticket, was made and brought out to the table. So it had to be server error if this is going to work.

I have seen this many times when I was serving back in the day. The customer orders something and then when it is brought out they either don't like the look of it, have changed their minds or want something free and they will tell you that you brought the wrong food out. It's very annoying and happens more than you would think. Then again, I've also seen servers forget what the hell the customer ordered because they are preoccupied with something else and punch in the wrong item just to get the ticket going. So this is a tough one. But in this case I would think that the customer probably ordered the wrong thing.

They should be looking into a few things though, like how many complaints has this server had in the past for wrong orders? Is this a pattern they have? Was everyone else's order correct at the table? And if the guy was allergic to shellfish, why in the hell did he NOT smell the crab in the entree. Crab has a very distinctive odor and your average person could reasonably discern that there was something "fishy" with the food.

Bottom line is that the server, even though they did repeat the order to the customer, should have pointed out that there was shellfish in that particular dish during the ordering phase. Just as they should point out if peanut oil was used in the preparation of a dish. Common sense...

Side Note:

This is our 200th post! I didn't think I would make it this far!

1 comment:

Metro said...

Well congrats on the 200th. Looking forward to your thousandth now.

There's one other possibility--the customer may simply have ordered the CO rather than the CF by mistake.

It's happened to me--you get distracted for a moment, you think you ordered one thing, but when the "wrong" order arrives you think Hey, I DID order this, didn't I?

By the way, if you have a service background you may wish to look at this site. And this one.