Today was the last day in our particular work group of a co-worker/friend . He’ll still be working at XXX, but in a new area. The best part for him is that he won’t have to answer phones anymore.
We decided that we would go to Benihanas for lunch, since we could take some extra time and make the all you can eat sushi worthwhile. On a normal day, we can’t make this work, since Benihanas opens at 11:30, and some of us have to be on the phones at noon.
We arrive at Benihanas, which is near Flatirons Crossing, in Broomfield, CO, slightly before 11:30, just to make things easy for the staff, it takes us a get few minutes to get seated, which is to be expected.
The wait staff has been stellar up until this point. They get orders, and scurry off to fill them, at least 4 people have ordered all you can eat sushi.
Fast forward to about 12:15, 8 out of 10 people have recieved food, and are almost finished. However, John and myself have not even recieved our first helping of sushi. We try to get the attention of the wait staff, and they see us, but ignore us.
We ask for a manager, and it takes about 10 minutes to get the manager. When she does arrive, it becomes fairly apparant that she is not the most experienced customer service manager. No explanation of what went wrong, no apology, and she is somewhat flippant with John.
When we do actually get our first round of sushi, the quality is ok, but the orders where wrong, and the sushi rice was hot enough to make the tuna in the tuna rolls warm.
After this point, service is OK, nothing spectacular, but not as bad as it was earlier.
Normally when something like this happens, you would expect the manager either to pick lunch up, or at least offer a discount to make up for it, but nothing like that happened. The wait staff presented bills as if nothing at all unusual had happened.
According to John, the manager did explain that they were busier than expected. Some other discussion led to the conclusion that everybody working there was a rookie. The manager was new, the waitrons were new, and the sushi chefs were new. Also, none of the sushi chefs were Nipponese.
The manager did indeed tell me “we’re just busier than we expected”, implying that because we were such a large party, we caused the problem.
What truly annoyed me was other patrons arrived after us, ordered, got served, finished their meal, and left before we got our food. It really comes down to the fact that they lost our orders for 45m or so. At one point, I saw them searching through a pile of the sushi order sheets for ours. I did initially get my miso, but that was it.
The manager wasn’t particularly apologetic, and didn’t really handle it well. I’d have expected them to make sure our tickets were at the top of the list thereafter, but it was still slow. It was marginally entertaining to have the manager serving us, though.
For an all-you-can-eat meal, to stall us like that is worthy of them giving it to us for free. I’m amazed they had the gall to hand us the tickets to pay.
And, best of all, you left out the discussion about McDonald’s service!
I should have told the MickeyD’s story, but was trying to leave the anger out as much as possible.