Not A Serene Experience

I'm going to be writing (again) about a lack of service which i encountered.

This would make it the second time in a month that i've encountered bad service. Something must be terribly wrong with the training provided to our service staff.

The fiance had picked me up after work on Friday, for a much needed nice dinner to unwind from the crazy work week.

We decided to try Serenity Spanish Bar & Restaurant at VivoCity as there was no queue. On hindsight, now i know why.

We ordered a tapas to start, a Paella Valenciana to share and were told there was a 45 minutes wait for the paella. We didn't mind. Our tapas - croquettes came. We finished it within minutes and continued to wait patiently for our main dish. There was still no sight of the elusive paella. We were relieved to see a service staff bring out a paella and walk in our direction.

However, he whisked past us and brought the paella to the table of ladies behind us. We were taken aback. The ladies came at least 10 minutes after us and we were very sure we placed our orders before them. How was it they got their order first? But, before we could ask him if he had gotten our orders mixed up, he was gone.

We called another service staff (let's call him B) and told him what happened. B told us he would help us to check. He came back minutes later and told us that indeed, our order was placed earlier than the other table's and the service staff had sent it to the wrong table. He apologised and said he had told the kitchen to put our order as priority and we should be expecting it in 3 minutes.

10 minutes later and still no paella. I told the fiance that if i were working in the restaurant, i would try to provide some form of service recovery, like a free dessert or something to appease the customers. But of course, we didn't expect that from them, because how many F&B outlets in Singapore offer service recovery?

Our paella finally came and it looked so pathetic we both wanted to laugh. For close to $50 bucks, it only had 4 prawns, 3-4 pieces of chicken, 3 slices of chorizo, lots of peas and a sprinkle of squid pieces. Seriously, what's with restaurants and short changing its customers nowadays? But i am not going to harp on that because this entry is meant to be on their service.

When the bill came, the fiance told the service staff that he was not going to pay for service charge because he didn't feel it was fair we had to pay.

The service staff brought the bill back to the cashier and B came back with it.

The fiance looked at the bill and noticed it was the same one. He repeated what he had told the service staff earlier about how we did not want to pay for service charge.

B became defensive and said, "But Sir, you agreed to wait for 45 minutes when you placed your order." I can't belive he had forgotten what he told us earlier about the service staff mixing up our order.

The fiance said, "Yes but you made us wait longer than 45 minutes."

B then said he would have to check on that and went off to the cashier.

When he came back, he told us, "Sir, your order was placed at 752pm and it indeed came within 45 minutes."

The fiance said, "No, the issue here is not that we had to wait 45 min for the paella. We don't mind waiting, but not when we had to wait for the additional time, because the service staff had served the dish to the wrong table."

B said he was the supervisor and would speak to the manager to see what we can do.

He soon finally came back with the bill, sans service charge and said "The service staff who made the mistake will pay for the service charge." Was he trying to make us feel bad?

Before we left, another service staff came and asked us how was everything and whether there was anything wrong with the food. We told him honestly about our experience and hoped that they could do something to improve, perhaps put table number placards (we noticed there were no table numbers, and maybe that's why the mistake happened?). The service staff apologised sincerely and thanked us for our feedback.

We weren't trying to be difficult or calculative. It was the principle behind it. It's hard to believe that this guy who wasn't the supervisor, was the one who wanted to improve the situation, while the supervisor didn't make any efforts at service recovery.

If you read the other reviews on HungryGoWhere, they are equally bad. I also noticed that the restaurant had the Singapore Service Star accreditation.

How they got it, i've no clue.