It pays to complain..

Over the weekend it was Mother's Day (Did you remember?  Oh, well done). 
If "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" has taught me anything it's that, along with Valentine's Day, Mothering Sunday is one of the busiest days in the restaurant calendar.  So we had booked, quite early on, to go to the local Beefeater restaurant.  Now I know Beefeater is never going to win any Michelin stars for it's food, but it's not bad, had a reasonably priced Mother's Day menu with some good choices on there, and is reasonably kid friendly.  Also Beefeater do this most amazing Ice Cream dessert that has hot chocolate sauce poured over it and contains mini pieces of fudge and mini-Maltesers which is quite yum.  Anyway, my better half was quite looking forward to it which, on that particular day, was all that mattered really.

Now all had begun swimmingly, we'd been shown to our table, our order had been taken promptly, the drinks had arrived quickly (always a good sign) and starters were all well and good..

..and then things all went horribly wrong.
Now, the missus is pregnant (as regular readers will know) and one of the downsides of this is that she's not allowed to have her steak rare anymore (something about it having to be cooked properly so as not to risk anything harming the baby).  However I have no such concerns, so had ordered my steak rare as anything (just show it the flame for a few minutes.  In fact bring me a live cow, I'll slice off what I want and ride the rest home).  Both of us quite fancied the Barbeque sauce with our steak though..

Now when the steaks turned up we immediately spotted one problem.. there was no Barbeque sauce on either, but this may have been a blessing in disguise.. as when I cut into my steak it was clear that mine was severely overdone (well at least medium well done) and when she cut into hers it was like a scene from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" as blood spilled out onto the plate.

However this wasn't the problem.. at this point, nothing had to be ruined..  We shrugged, said "Oh dear, they've got the steaks mixed up" and called the waitress over.  All we wanted was for our meals to be changed and the whole incident would have passed unnoticed.

But, oh no, first this waitress tried to argue with us and say we'd got it wrong, until we clearly demonstrated the two differences.. and then she, really shirtily, said she'd get the kitchen to sort it out.  So we were a little unimpressed at this point, you don't expect to be argued with when you have a genuine mistake on your hands, but never mind.. We were a bit annoyed but nothing getting our meal right wouldn't fix.

But, oh no, the restaurant didn't know when to quit when it was ahead..
Next we get this young snotty upstart of a restaurant manager coming over to us next, and at first I'm daft enough to think "Ahh.. here comes an apology, at least".  But oh no, this guy starts to argue with us too, and then has the audacity to begin criticising the missus for not ordering a well done steak whilst she was pregnant.  This, needless to say, upsets her a great deal and I wanted to chin the git.  We left at that point, very, very angry and wondering where the hell we were going to get a Mother's Day meal now..

To cut a long story short, we did find another restaurant and eventually did get a nice meal.
But all day I was really annoyed at the way we'd been treated and spoken to at the Beefeater, and it kinda ate away at me..

So, finally, I went on the internet.. there was no way to Contact anyone on the Beefeater site, but it did mention on there that the Beefeater were part of the Whitbread chain.. Right then, off to http://www.whitbread.co.uk where I proceeded to write a calm, but suitably snotty, complaint mail. 

I must have struck a nerve though, as I got a grovelling phone call yesterday from the restaurant manager apologising (funny, if he's just done that in the first place none of this would have happened).  Now I'm only guessing, but I do reckon that someone from Whitbread head office fired a rocket up the manager's arse in response to my mail, hence this amazing U-turn in apology policy.  We've been offered the standard complimentary meal by way of apology, which I'm not actually sure we're going to use (as we're both pretty annoyed at Beefeater), but at least it does show that complaining can get results!!