The dining experience

... Or the lack of it!

Last Sunday, we went to one of the"decent" restaurants in town [Moti Mahal at Shipra mall, in case anyone wants to be warned]. And we had an experience we are not likely to forget any soon.

There was an extremely noisy live program [hosted by some store to mark its inaugration] going on at the lower ground floor [we were at the third], which certainly did nothing to enhance the "dining experience". We placed our order for the starters, and deliberated over the main course. The starters arrived after some time. The usual practice is to place one or two pieces, and set the serving plate on the side. But the waiter seemed to be in a real hurry - he served the entire contents at once, but he hurried to take back the plate (along with the salad), so we had to ask him to leave the plate on the table. As if irritated, he dumped the whole of the salad in one of the plates. Despite the bad service, we proceeded to eat, when we realized we were one fork short, and had no knives at all. We called out the waiter, who was too busy finding out what was happening on the ground floor, to listen to us. This stretched our patience, and when he finally turned up, we asked him to call the manager. Instead of doing so, he proceeded to another table to take their order. I got up finally to look for the manager, and described the scenario to him. Instead of being apologetic in the least, he calmly informed us he will get the cutlery. And when he did, we still had one knife less! We asked the waiter to get another one, and told him that we want to cancel the rest of the order, but the manager displayed no signs of remorse even at this stage! This was when we paid our bill and walked out. We didn't need to cancel the order, because the waiter had never bothered to take it!!

Whose loss was it ? Ours [it spoiled our dinner], the restaurant's [we are not going to go back, and advise our friends to do the same], the manager's [if everyone faces similar situations, the restaurant is not going to last long, and his job would be at stake] or the waiter's [he lost his tip, and stands to lose the job if the place goes down hill].

I have recounted one of the experience, but this post is not about just one experience. There have been incidents in past, when the poor quality of service in some of the better known restaurants gave a lot of disappointment. It gives me an impression that though these kind of places compete with the best in terms of pricelist, they have no stand whatsoever when it comes to service and/or taste. And then there are the gaffes which can only be considered as faux pas of fine dining.
Televisions may be acceptable in crowded food courts, or in McD, but in a restaurant? Do you want to enjoy the food [which you are paying a good amount of sum for], or do you want to watch TV, which you do anyway daily at home? The place mentioned above had a seating for two, right under a 30-inch flat screen! Perhaps they wanted to give the rest of the diners an option to watch the TV, or the couple, whichever they found more interesting?
And the music? Music might enhance your dining experience, but I think that implies soft music, preferably instrumental. What are restaurant managements thinking of, when they play rock music or local FM channels on full blast, so you have to shout to hear yourself? Or even popular music, or piano tunes of old hindi films, for that matter? Are they trying to distract you from the food? The lesser attention you pay, the lesser the amount of competence required on their part ??

The basic question is, why is there an absolute lack of attention to make dining an "experience"? Is it a perceived lack of expectation on the part of the diners, or an indifference or perhaps ignorance, on the part of the restaurants?