125. Fiddly Finger Food

I never complain in restaurants.  If the service is poor, I keep quiet and if the food is awful I say nothing.  I just put it down to experience and I never return. 

But, if the waiter or waitress makes a point of coming over to our table during the meal and interrupting the conversation to ask, “Is everything all right?” or, “How is your food?” I will tell him or her exactly what I think of it.

I work on the assumption that they ask because they want to know.  Caroline says that they are just trying to be polite but I don’t think that it’s very polite to interrupt two, four or six people just at the moment that I am reaching the denouement of a very interesting, amusing and always captivating anecdote.

Perhaps it’s because I never complain that I am never embarrassed in restaurants - except once, perhaps.  We visited “The Hoxton Apprentice” in Hackney where Hannah, a teaching assistant who helped me at school, was employed in the evenings.  Part of Hannah’s function at this training restaurant was to look after and supervise the long-term unemployed young men and women who were being given a start in the restaurant business.

Our table wasn’t ready and we were asked to wait in the bar.  I asked the young woman for a red wine and a gin and tonic.  She came back a minute later and put the gin and tonic in front of Caroline. 

“No, that’s mine,” I said.

“You can’t ‘ave that,” she scoffed, loudly. 

“That’s a girl’s drink!”

You will have heard of road rage but have you ever witnessed food rage?  I did once and although it was very funny, it was also embarrassing. 

Some thirty ago, I toured the West Country with Malcontents Cricket Club.  Our scorer was an Irishman called Murty.  After a match at Instow in Devon one evening, some of us were eating in a pub.  Murty ordered steak and chips.  When his meal arrived, along with his steak and fries, there were peas on the plate.  Murty exploded. 

“Peas!” He shouted at the waiter.  “I hate the bastards!” 

The place went quiet and everyone in the pub looked at our table.

“You can’t trust peas,” he roared. “Take them away and put my steak on a clean plate.  I don’t want any trace of the little bastards.” 

I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so genuinely angry.

I love eating shrimps and prawns.  However, the two worst gastronomic experiences I have ever had in a restaurant have been when I ordered them but I stayed very composed and never reacted the way Murty did.

Caroline and I were driving across northern France from Calais to Paris.  We arrived in Amiens at around two o’clock in the afternoon and the first thing we did was to find a bar that served food.  I ordered “crevettes, pain brun”.  I can’t remember what Caroline had and neither can she - but we both remember my shrimps. 

I don’t know where those shrimps came from.  It was probably The Bay of Somme and I don’t know if they were graded into three sizes as are the best shrimps in the world that come from Morcambe Bay. 

Some people - strange people - advocate eating the whole shrimp.  They believe that the head and tail have the most flavour and are “texturally exciting”.  Texturally exciting?  Only if you are excited by having shreds of chitin stuck between your teeth are they texturally exciting.  I know of someone who eats them whole, fried in chilli oil with chopped onion and then served cold with a lime wedge.  I will never eat whole shrimps.

Some shrimps are sold whole and intact to restaurants, but most are shelled.  I have no idea why any restaurant ever wants them unshelled. The bar in Amiens where we had lunch was one that did.

When brown shrimps are peeled commercially it is by machine but the smallest grade of shrimp is difficult and more than half of these smallest shrimps need to have the last obstinate pieces of shell removed by hand.  The women who do this job, and it is always women, need to have perfect, sharp eyesight and the fingers of a surgeon.  I have neither.

My shrimps were unpeeled and whole.  Not one of them was more than two centimetres long and I was presented with half a kilogram, or just more than a pound of the little buggers. 

About 25 minutes after our food had arrived Caroline had finished eating and although I had been peeling and eating as fast as I could, I had made no apparent difference to the level of the shrimps in the bowl.

After another half an hour, Caroline asked me to hurry up.  I thought about abandoning the shrimps and ordering a croque-monsieur but I stubbornly persevered.

“At the rate you’re eating them,” she told me, “I think you’ll be eating for at least another hour and it will be dark by then.”

“Why don’t you help and peel some too?” I asked.

“Because I think I’ll have some chocolate gateau and I don’t want to have fishy fingers.”

I never did finish them.  I was still hungry but I was bored.  We left and I bought a chocolate bar on the way out.

There is a restaurant near to where we live that we have visited many times.  Last Friday evening I ordered something on the starter menu that I hadn’t seen before:

Pan-fried tiger prawns with sweet chilli & ginger sauce.

The first ‘alarm bell’ rang when the waiter brought a finger bowl to our table. 

“Oh no!  I’m going to have to peel them,” I said to Caroline.  “Do you remember the shrimps in France?” 

“I certainly do,” she said.  “But tiger prawns are huge and there’ll only be two or three of them.  Shouldn’t be a problem.”

She couldn’t have been more wrong.  Four tiger prawns arrived at the table still in their shells but straight from the pan.  They were scalding hot.  I picked up one and dropped it immediately.  The waiter came by.

“How am expected to eat these?” I asked.       

He was very polite but no help at all.  By the time Caroline had finished her tuna carpaccio, I had managed to decapitate one prawn and pull its tail shell off but eaten nothing.  They were still ridiculously hot.

“Sorry about this,” I said.  “They’re still too hot to touch.”

“I don’t think they sell Mars Bars here,” said Caroline.

We were eating our main courses when the manager came to our table and said that she’d been told that there had been a problem.  I explained and she came out with the predictable response.  

I have said before in, “Trailblazer”, (click to see) that those responsible for dealing with a problem all seem to believe that the best way to diffuse the situation when someone complains is to feign ignorance of the very existence of that problem. 

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “We’ve had that dish on the menu for five years and no one has ever had a difficulty with it before.”

That was not just nonsense, it was a lie.  It had not been on the menu for years because if it had been, I would have seen it and ordered it before. 

Why do restaurants sometimes serve shrimps and prawns with their shells on and intact?  Apart from boiled eggs and some other types of shellfish, I can't think of any food variety which the diner has to prepare at the table before eating.  I only wish I didn’t like shrimps and prawns so much.

I dealt with those situations very quietly and stayed calm throughout.  I can’t imagine how Murty could have reacted.

109. A Fizzy SCAM!

Having been forced to be teetotal for the past eight years, I have become something of a connoisseur of non-alcoholic drinks.  When I eat in a restaurant, I usually have sparkling mineral water with whatever I choose from the menu, whether it be red meat, chicken, fish or pasta. 

Unlike the wines I drank during the dinners of my younger days, when the selection was primarily based upon cost, and the quality of the wines varied enormously, there is, in my opinion, very little variation in the taste and quality of sparkling mineral waters.  One ice-cold sparkling mineral water with a slice of lemon tastes much like any other ice-cold sparkling mineral water with a slice of lemon.  There are some exceptions of course but very few.

Wines vary in quality from the literally undrinkable to the heavenly.  Sometime in the mid eighties, four of us went to a well known and very expensive restaurant in the City of London that was offering three courses from the a la carte menu for only £9 a head.  We anticipated that the final bill would come to around £60 but the wine was so sublime (and so expensive) that the final total came to more than £200.

On the other hand, sparkling mineral water is never undrinkable but then again, never awe-inspiring.  If the quality of wine varies on a ten-point scale from 1 to 10, then sparkling mineral water varies from perhaps 4 to 7 and if the flavour is altered by the addition of a slice of lemon and ice, that range is even narrower.

Recently, I have become aware of a scam that is possibly costing people like you and me, collectively, hundreds of thousand of pounds a year.  I first began to suspect that a deceit was being perpetrated by some restaurants a couple of years ago.

Whenever the bottle of mineral water was brought to our table at a restaurant that we visited often, the waitress would twist the metal bottle top, open the bottle and pour some of the water into a glass that was already loaded with ice and lemon.  She then left the bottle on the table and walked away.

Last Saturday we were in a restaurant in Calderdale in Yorkshire.  The food was excellent and the mineral water was satisfactory.  Just before I emptied the last of the bottle into my glass, I asked for another.  When it arrived I asked the waiter not to open the bottle but to leave it on the table.  Instead of just doing that, he asked me, “Why?”

I wish now that I had told him to mind his own business but instead, I told him that I hadn’t finished the first bottle yet and I didn’t want this second one to start going flat.

When I opened it some ten minutes later, I found that the cap was screwed on very tightly but there was no “crack” of the breaking seal as I turned it.  When I examined the bottle top I saw that it had not been attached to a metal rim.  There was no seal to break.

We have a SodaStream unit at home.  It makes sparkling water at a cost of about £0.05 a litre.  When ice and a slice of lemon is added, SodaStream sparkling water becomes indistinguishable from the “mineral” water I am sometimes served in some restaurants.

I can see why they do it.  The bottle of water I was presented with in Yorkshire cost them less than 2p to produce but I was charged £3.50 for the pleasure of drinking it.  That is some mark up.

Someone should investigate and do something about it!

October 16th 2015

This is the bottle of sparkling mineral water as it arrived at our table this evening.  Notice that the seal is already broken.

51. That won't do nicely!

I was in a black cab going down Regent Street in central London.  We reached Mappin and Webb.  I got out and handed the driver £15 to pay the £14.40 fare.  As I turned away from the taxi I felt a smattering of objects on my arm.  The cab driver had thrown coins at me.

“Keep ‘em mate.  You need it more than me.”

GRATUITY: Something given voluntarily or beyond obligation, usually for some service.

That dictionary definition of a gratuity or tip seems pretty clear to me what it means. For years in the UK, they were a part of my life that I gave little attention to but in the five years that I lived on Cayman gratuities became a big part of my daily activity.  Not only were tips expected at the usual places but the bar staff expected to keep the 50 cents change from a $3.50 bottle of beer.  They expected a tip for doing what exactly?  Their job!  That’s all.

Percentages are not subject to inflation.  Things may have changed a little but in London in 2005, 10% was the standard addition to a restaurant bill and the usual tip for a taxi ride too.  Occasionally 12% was added to a restaurant bill but it was the exception.  It was not always printed on the menu as an expectation of payment either.  When I left a tip, I didn’t work out a percentage.  I gave the amount that I thought was appropriate.  Anyway, why should a waiter be tipped more for bringing a plate of lobster to my table than for bringing a beefburger of equal weight?  It doesn’t make sense.

Why tip anyway?  Gratuities in restaurants in France and Italy are not overtly expected nor requested.  In France, by law a 15% service charge always included in the price wherever you eat or drink.

Tipping in Italy is by and large an exception, not a rule.  It’s something you give to reward exceptionally good service. If the service is normal, then tipping is neither necessary nor expected.  The ‘coperta’ or cover charge and the ‘servizio’ or service charge is included in every restaurant bill.

Gratuities here in the UK have been described as, “arbitrary, antiquated and discreditable,” but in the States they are part of the fabric of society because waiting and bar staff are paid so appallingly.

It has been argued that countries with more “extroverted” and “neurotic” people give tips to the greatest number of services and also tipped the largest amounts and that America’s brash, extrovert culture encourages tipping.  But how then do you explain the lack of tipping in Australia and New Zealand, where the big-mouthed, extroverted, drinking culture (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) rivals America’s?   The answer is, I think, that Aussies, in the service industry, don’t depend so much on tips for their income.

In Japan, where the culture is in many ways the antithesis of America’s, tipping is not required and in fact may cause embarrassment or offence to those tipped.  If you tip, it could be seen as a mistake on your part.  A friend, recently returned from Tokyo, has told me of a waiter who chased him down the street to tell him that he had left money on the table.  When the porter stood an extra moment or two in his hotel room, he was not waiting for a tip.  He was waiting to make sure everything was satisfactory.  This is just good customer service.

I had lunch in a restaurant on Ocean Drive, South Beach, Miami in December 2009.  When the check came the gratuity had been added at 22%.  Before I paid I checked the menu and could find no mention of the gratuity rate on it. I asked the waiter where the 22% figure had come from and he told me that it was the standard rate along the strip. “If 50% were standard,” I asked, “would I be expected to pay that?”  He became angry and flounced off saying, “OK don’t pay it.  I’ll work for nothing.”

Later I asked him what he meant by, ‘working for nothing’.  He told me that his pay was $1.00 (63p) an hour and he depended on the tips to survive.  Of course, I relented immediately and then probably I overtipped him.

This situation is outrageous.  I would much rather have paid $25 for my crab salad and not have had that experience, than pay $20, feel cheated and then partly humiliate the poor guy who was just doing his job.  Restaurant and bar owners in the US and the UK should pay a living wage to staff and put it on to the prices of their products.  In the US the restaurant owners can get away with this because the only people in the States who can legally make less than the minimum wage are people who receive gratuities.

I have never checked but I am pretty sure that I always leave more when a bill has, “Gratuity not included” printed on it. There is a restaurant in Cayman that has no fixed charges.  Patrons pay what they feel is the right amount for the food, the drinks and the service that they have received.  There is a similar place in London and it is always full.

In Cayman, there is the phenomenon of “Mandatory Gratuity” printed on the menu.  WHAT?  If ever there were an oxymoron, this must be it.  Those words are printed on the menus of several very expensive restaurants in or near George Town.

A couple of years ago Caroline and I were in one of these expensive restaurants.  We ordered our main courses and waited for about twenty minutes.  Eventually the food arrived.  That would have been fine – we could cope with a wait that long – if Caroline’s order had not been totally wrong.  She had ordered shrimp but was presented with lamb.  My plate had been left in front of me and as it was getting cold, I started to eat.  I had finished by the time her food arrived.

I took 15% off the grand total and paid the exact amount in cash.  As we were getting up to leave the waiter returned and demanded the missing $20.  I explained that I was not paying it and why.  Then the manager came over and the two of them harangued me while the other diners stared open mouthed.  We tried to go but they blocked the doorway and wouldn’t let us leave.  This stalemate lasted for 5 or 6 minutes while I tried to explain the nature of a gratuity to them and only ended when Caroline made a big show of phoning the police.

In the States, calling the police might not have worked.  In November 2009 a restaurant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, actually had two people arrested for refusing to pay a mandatory 18% gratuity.  The couple had to find their own napkins and cutlery while their waitress went outside for a smoke; they had to go to the bar themselves to ask for refills and then had to wait over an hour for salad and wings.  That sounds like terrible service and if I were put in that position I would have simply walked out 30 minutes after ordering.  I’ve done that twice in the UK. 

It’s hard to believe that the police took them away and they had criminal theft charges filed against them for failing to pay a mandatory $16.35 gratuity but that’s what happened.  It doesn’t mean they didn’t have options available to them.  They just chose the wrong one.  The case was eventually dropped and didn’t come to court.

Sometimes I am keen to give a gratuity.  When two deliverymen struggled in oppressive heat to carry heavy kitchen goods into my house in Cayman, I had a real problem getting them to accept the $20 I thrust upon them when they had finished.  Certainly they were being paid by the company to do it but their enthusiasm, good nature and general niceness had brightened my day.

Where is the line drawn with tipping? Why do we tip hairdressers and not dentists?  They both spend about the same length of time using their skill to work on a part of your head.

Why don’t we tip the cashier at the supermarket; the post office worker who hands you a parcel; the assistant at Wendy’s who serves you a coffee or the policeman who takes your statement after a traffic accident?  Why do we give the dustmen a Christmas bonus but not the postman or the street cleaner?

It’s an embarrassing, anachronistic nightmare and I hate it.