Getting What You Pay For
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Tuesday, February 02, 2010 10:03 PM
This past weekend my husband and I went out for dinner. I ordered crab cakes, and they were great, with big lumps of crab and almost no filler. Unfortunately, they were also lukewarm.
I politely asked for the crab cakes to be reheated a little, but instead they brought me new ones. Which were, unfortunately, actually colder than their predecessors. I had Bryan stick his finger into the center of one to confirm that I wasn’t imagining things: the middle of the cake felt like it was still refrigerated.
My third set of crab cakes were steaming hot, finally, but by then my husband had finished his dinner and had to sit and watch me eat mine. Considering this, we protested only weakly when our waiter told us they’d removed my dinner from the bill. We weren’t under a time crunch that evening, but if we had been, the Crab Cake Saga would’ve been a huge inconvenience.
As we left the restaurant (after eating a delicious piece of carrot cake that was the perfect temperature) I remarked to Bryan that sometimes it’s quite beneficial to be the type of person who sends things back. This time, I got a free entree out of it! The extra fifteen minutes I waited to eat them doesn’t seem such a big deal in light of the fact that my crab cakes ended up costing us nothing.
I try to be as gracious as possible, but I have no qualms about making complaints about products or services when I’m paying money for them.
Dinner at a friend’s house is different. In my opinion, the only proper thing to say about food which someone else has made and served is, “wow, this is wonderful!”
But in a restaurant, providing good food is their half of the agreement. If I refused to pay the bill, they’d certainly call me on my failure to keep my half of the agreement! Therefore, I think it’s perfectly appropriate for me to expect them to keep theirs.
However, I know many people who don’t feel this way, or who might agree in principle but could never actually bring themselves to send back a plate of crab cakes no matter how lukewarm they might be. Are you one of them? I’d love to hear about your perspective on this topic.
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