A Day on the Pale Blue Dot - 8

Sunday, 7th May 2023

Second Chance?

The day started off with a beautiful breakfast prepared by my wife - Masala Dosa and Egg Dosas. Whenever Masala Doas is on the menu, I would get Egg Dosas instead. I am not a big fan of Masala Dosa.

Unlike the beautiful breakfast, the lunch experience was on the other extreme; so bad, that we have not had such a bad experience in recent times.

There was this one Kashmiri restaurant nearby that I had wanted to visit since a long time. Today, we thought we'd try that out. We reserved tables for 2:30 PM using benefits of Zomato's Carnival offer where we'd get 50% off on the final bill. Cool, right?

We reach this restaurant at 2:20 PM but we were told to wait on the ground floor since the tables were full. The restaurant service happens on the 1st floor. After waiting 15 minutes, there was no sign of they coming to us. So we went up to the 1st floor to enquire. We were told that the tables were not free yet.

We waited. And we got a table after 3 PM. The table was not cleaned after the previous customers had left. More waiting. We had already decided on our orders by looking at the restaurant menu through Zomato/Swiggy. We just wanted one of the waiters to come and take our order. A waiter comes to get our orders at 3:15 PM, and he told us that the menu has been revamped. We should order from the new menu available of their website. We proceeded to do as suggested. And waited more.

The waiter returned at 3:30 PM and took our orders. At this point, it has been an hour and 10 minutes since we reached the restaurant. Meanwhile, we ask another waiter to please clean our table. We were astonished to hear his reply, "Sir, we are very busy. We will do it shortly!"

I mean, "What??" Cleaning a dirty table when customers are made to sit is not a priority for them?

At 4 PM, our food arrives. Bad food too! After all this wait, if at all the food was good, we would have been okay-ishly content. From the consistency of the gravy, it looked like they ran out of curry and then added some water and corn-flour to quickly make some extra curry. The pulav was over-cooked and lightly squishy. Our hopes of having some good Kashmiri food - down the drain.

Disappointed with the entire experience (of almost 2 and half hours!), the bill finally arrived. Ah, the audacity of the restaurant to include service charges on the bill - laughable! We promptly asked them to remove the service charges from the bill, to which the obliged without any resistance.

I am normally a personal who would give 2nd chances to restaurants - hoping that they were just having a bad day. But I did read some similar comments on their Zomato reviews. This restaurant probably might not get a second chance from me - unless something drastic changes are made from their side. And we do have another Kashmiri restaurant nearby - that offers excellent service and food.

Today was a gamble - and we lost.