I don't usually complain, but...
Last week we went out to eat at a local restaurant whilst
holidaying in the family mobile home.
It’s always a gamble, especially in a holiday resort, where tourists
line up to be disappointed by mediocre food and disaffected kitchen staff, and
owners lose sleep over rents and retirement funds, vying with other eateries
for customers. Of course, bad
experiences are rare in France – we were just unlucky I suppose.
It was to be primarily a social occasion. The meal would be
of secondary importance. There was Al,
my husband, Alfie, my son, Sally and Paul, two friends, Ollie, Sam and Tom,
their teenage sons.
Someone had recommended a place. Sally checked out the menu
in advance and judging it to be refreshingly different from the ubiquitous
pizza or hamburger restaurants, booked a table for eight thirty.
I’ll admit, I’m always a bit nervous about eating out at the
best of times – home cooking is generally so much better. And, although French cuisine is more exciting than the local
Beefeater Pub fare in England, one tourist resort is very much like another no
matter where you are. You never know what you’re going to get, who will be
preparing it, or whether it will provoke a violent reaction later. But, as I say, it was all about the company.
The menu was ominously prolific. Gordon Ramsay would have given it a severe edit. We made our selections, some
of us ordering a starter and all of us carefully selecting a main course from
the modern wipe-down menu. If only I
had ventured into the back of the restaurant before the waitress came to take
our orders.
Tom and I ordered cod in a sauce (unspecified, but which
turned out to be largely flour and water), served with summer vegetables (cold
sweet peppers tainted with curry powder).
Four of our party went for the notorious French entrecote and chips,
Sally had moules mariniere, Al had sole.
The starters arrived and were eaten: A few prawns served with a dollop of mayonnaise, a meagre fruits de mer
platter that looked as though it had been in a can moments earlier, an underwhelming ‘chiffonade’ of ham for Tom, fish soup for Alfie (straight from a jar, complete with sludge), and
enormous salads for Paul, Ollie and Sam (mostly lettuce, decorated with cheese,
fish and ham respectively). We were struck by the variations in portion size
and nervously fascinated by the oddity of the dishes.
My piece of cod came skin-up. It measured less than the size of a small bar of soap and had
rather less to recommend it in terms of flavour (I imagine). The chef had lavished four potato wedges on
me and the afore-mentioned summer vegetables sat in a one-person earthenware dish, shivering. I exchanged more than glances with the
waitress, who offered to bring me another piece of fish, and vanished before I
could stop her.
I apologised to the party, feeling churlish for being so negative. This was no beachside café,
however, and the prices had hinted at some element of quality, not to mention a
warm plate and a few therms running through the food upon it.
We drank more wine, tried to find something positive to say,
but Alfie reluctantly admitted that his steak was mostly fat, as was Sam’s, Ollie's and Paul’s. They ate the parts that were edible and
looked miserable. Al, affable and
uncomplaining, had eaten half his sole before asking me whether it should be
pink and frozen in the middle.
In the
meantime, our waitress returned with another miniscule piece of cod in a
microwave-safe dish, only to meet my eye and hear that I would not eat it,
neither would I pay for my meal, adding that Al’s fish was raw.
His second sole was hot and delicious.
By
this time, the simple act of eating had become surreal.
The waitress placed her hands on her hips and adopted a conspiratorial air. Over the course of the next few minutes, various discoveries
were made to explain her pained yet strangely gleeful expression: The owner, she said, was not himself. He was standing in for the washer-upper and, as a result, the ‘chef’ had been left unsupervised in the kitchen with his lack of passion
running wild. This meant, our waitress
told us, that he was serving ‘n’importe quoi’ to the diners. I asked my son what this meant (he’s fluent
in conversational derogatory French, whereas I am more at home reading Moliere)
and he told me that it meant the food was basically ‘bollocks’. I could only agree. As could the waitress.
Grumblings began to turn to calls for action and as the rest
of the party had little French (my son was not confident enough to rise to the challenge), I asked the waitress to take me to the ‘patron’. A light flickered in her eye and she led me
to the open kitchen where I was met by two young men (one no more than a
teenager) both evidently brimming with pent up emotion and unused to being
caught out. I told them that they
should be ashamed to serve such food to their customers. This seemed to hit home – they had been
expecting a rather more aggressive attack, I think. I felt no remorse for their embarrassment. The
food had been exceptionally inedible.
The waitress, who was now unabashedly delighting in the
spectacle of their maroon faces, led me further into the restaurant to speak to
the patron, who was hosing down plates and looking shifty. On the counter, were the remnants of four
entrecotes. His first defence was to
point out the edible bits, sorting through the leftovers with a fork, oblivious
to my incredulity. I said that the meal had been awful and that our evening had
been ruined. What was he going to do
about it? I would have been satisfied
with an apology, a reduction in the bill and a quick getaway.
To my surprise, he responded that his evening had also been
ruined, adding with a petulant flourish, as though I should be pleased, that he had sacked the chef with immediate effect. In a gesture of magnanimity he had removed
the price of the meal I hadn’t eaten from the bill and offered to do the same for one of the
steak and chips.
Paul was all for walking out.
I negotiated further, amazed that the man in charge could
miss the point so completely.
In the end, the bill was adjusted a little more in our
favour, but the evening still cost us far too much. Al and I went on the big wheel, just to add some frivolity to an
otherwise sober evening, and because he had drunk too much wine. After that, we went home and Al had cheese and biscuits while I made myself a
lovely tomato sandwich.
