I wasn't impressed

As the title would've given away, this is going to be a ranting blog post.

Yes, I know that I said I am not going to rant in this space, but give me a break okay, I can get free pass every now and then.

In my older age (gah), I try to keep an open mind when it comes to trying new things. This is because quite a lot of the time, I do not have the luxury of time - time to spend doing leisurely stuff, you know. So when I do make the time (and it doesn't come very often), I'd like to make the most of it.

Despite the glowing reviews of Mr Wong (google it yourself), I am of view that it fell short of my expectations. And I didn't even have much to begin with. Some of the food I consumed tonight was okay. Out of the 10 or dishes that we ordered, only two things stood out for me: the steamed fish with chilly and the dumplings (yes, I know that some of you are not a big fan of the dumplings - at least they were not greasy). The service was atrocious, so much so that I don't even want to talk about it (seriously, getting the attention of a wait staff took forever, and paying the bill was a process that took longer than 5 minutes. Call me impatient, but when your customer, or anyone, really, wants to hand you over some money, bloody hell, just take it quickly, will ya??)

I would gladly pay a premium for good food and good service. But when these two things were not done brilliantly (or at least close to it), I felt cheated. It doesn't matter that you publish your menu on your website. When the delivery of service is shit, it's pretty much downhill from here. There is a reason as to why you are in the service industry.

On the same note, restaurants who do not answer their phones when I want to make a reservation also annoy the fuck out of me. There are people who would like to hand over their hard earned money to you at some point in the future, if you don't answer your phone, they feel rejected, and because they do, they go somewhere else, in search for something that they can have.

This is why the best restaurants are the ones that take customers' money as soon as they take their orders. Like McDonalds, for example. Even KFC is not like this. I haven't been to Japan, but I've been told that there quite a number of restaurants in Japan that do this, and I think these people got the most important thing sorted. I personally cannot think of a better business model for restaurants at this point in time.

So, needless to say, I did not leave a tip and I am not sure I'd like to come back to Mr Wong. If you don't do your job properly, there shall be no additional reward. I get that sometimes the poor performance of the wait staff is a function of the restaurant's policies and processes and procedures, so really, I shouldn't be not tipping (yes, poor sentence construction) because it is really not the wait staff's fault. But what can I say? I was a customer, I have parted with my money and we live in Australia whereby tipping is not the culture because wait staff gets decent wages (supposedly), unlike the land of the US of A whereby they get minuscule wages and rely heavily to make a living. In short, no, I am not sorry.