Tangy Crumble

A customer called up on the restaurant landline and asked for the Manager. He wanted to complain about a bad dining experience at our central Delhi outlet. He told me he’d gone to have a quick lunch and had ordered chicken pasta in a red wine sauce. He found the chicken to be under cooked and reported the same to the manager who didn’t do anything about it. Also, while leaving he had taken away a slice of apple crumble. On reaching home he found the apple crumble to be very tangy. Disgusted at the experience he decided to call me and complain.

I promised to check on this and call him back. I called up the Central Delhi outlet manager who told me that the customer had finished his food and told him about his issue only during billing. I asked him to check on the apple crumble, which he called back to report as being normally tangy.

I called the customer back. I reported that I’d checked with the manager at our central Delhi outlet and that he remembered the incident. I told him that we encouraged our customers to tell us if a dish was not up to the mark when they took the first bite.

As everything is freshly prepared it can be fixed. Unfortunately in this case the clearance was already done and the complaint was made only during billing. We’ve also checked the apple crumble, which is tangy as it should be since we use tangy green apples for it and add some lemon juice as well.

I added that if in the future he felt that something was not up to the mark he should let us know while he was still eating so the dish could be corrected/replaced.

He said that his wife was a teacher at a hotel management institute and even she’d found the crumble too tangy. I told him that recipes differ and ours was a variation that was very popular with our customers.

Mystery of the screw

I was at the gym during my break shift- rest between shifts- one early evening when my wife came by to hand over my cell phone, which I'd left at home. She said that there had been numerous missed calls and that she had taken one call, apparently from an irate customer. The customer had requested that I call back ASAP.

I checked the missed calls record and called back the Assistant Manager of our Oriental Restaurant. He reported that an incident had taken place during lunch wherein a piece of metal, a screw in fact, had been found in the customer's wok dish. All attempts at pacification had failed and they'd given the customer my direct number.

I immediately called back on the customer’s number and heard him out. According to him there was this ugly, disgusting, old metal screw in his food. Why then should he not report us to the municipal authorities, he fumed. I proffered my apologies and promised to call him back after investigating the incident.

I went to the Oriental place after my break. The problem, apart from the obvious facts, was that in this particular dish there was so little sauce that the chances of something not being detected before being served were remote. Also there would’ve been a metallic noise in the wok had there been a piece of metal while cooking. The pick-up boy who brought it from the kitchen and the actual server were both trustworthy.

What then was the explanation? I decided to place the facts in front of the customer just as I’d found them.

I called him up and explained. ‘We’ve checked the kitchen preparation area, all the sauces & ingredients. The only possible explanation could be that as some maintenance activity had taken place today, this might have fallen in. This is completely bizarre and we’re truly sorry this happened.’

He did not argue, accepted my apology and told me that we ought to be more careful in the future.

The Manager of the Oriental Restaurant, who was not around earlier, felt that the customer might himself have deliberately done this. While this was possible, what did he achieve? Also he’d not been as difficult as he possibly could’ve been.

What then was the answer, the true origins of the screw remain a mystery to date.