Bucharest Diatribe, 1: The Customer is Always Wrong....or So Many Good Restaurants, so much Terrible, Terrible Service...or, In the Middle of my Journey Through Life I found myself in a Crappy Restaurant
CURSED ARE THE WAITERS AND WAITRESSES OF BUCHAREST!
Dear Reader,
Before you decide at the outset that what follow are little more than the ornery ramblings of a spoiled, bourgeoisie American, hooked on middle-class materialist concerns and spoiled beyond belief, let me sketch my qualifications for critiquing (as consumer and expert both) the state of restaurant culture in Romania (for it is a "culture," and will only change if customers revolt against it):
I worked a decade in both terrible and excellent restaurants in Houston, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, employed in almost every capacity: dishwasher, bus boy, prep cook, grill man, bartender, waiter, head waiter, even assistant manager (admittedly, I was the only employee who was more or less sober during the day, qualifying me for a short-lived managerial position at a night club in Houston). Since then, I’ve become a competent cook, not to mention the owner of a wood-burning pizza oven (pertinent to what follows). In short, I know how to make good food, I know how to run a restaurant, and I know something about how to treat the human beings who come to a restaurant hoping to eat.
The general rule in the U.S. follows this cliché: “the customer is always right.” What does this mean? Complaints about food that has not been cooked correctly (or even if it has, not to the customer’s liking) are handled graciously.... since one comes to a restaurant EXPECTING to pay for what one wants. And because restaurants want, well, more business than less business, they follow that cliché to an almost irrational degree.
The general rule in Romania follows this standard pattern: “the customer is always wrong.” Case in point: we are at a beer garden on the gorgeous piazza of Brasov, having already spent a lot of money on several rounds of drinks and snacks. I order one more Gosser and when the waiter opens it at the table, we all smell that something is amiss—the beer smells like a week-old camel fart and tastes even less appealing than that. This happens with beer, right? The waiter ignores our disgusted reactions, forcing me to rise from the table to take the beer over to him:
Christopher: “I’m sorry, but this beer is clearly spoiled. Can you replace it?”
Waiter: “How is this my problem? I didn’t make the beer…”
Christopher: “But this is your restaurant and you served me bad beer. Please, taste it.”
Waiter [to my surprise, he does, with a slight grimace]: “Well, this is Austrian beer, and that’s how it is supposed to taste.”
Christopher: “But it tastes NOTHING like any of the other Gossers we’ve been served.”
Waiter: “Sorry, you ordered this beer.”
Christopher: “So do you want to be right or am I right? Charge me for an extra beer if you really think you are right.”
Waiter: [bewildered silence]
In the end, he did bring me a new beer and didn’t charge me for it. What did that take? An argument, complete with passionate gesticulations and angry faces from both parties.
Case in point: two weeks ago, I’m served room-temperature sarmale at La Mama, a usually reliable Romanian “diner” here in Bucharest. Really, the sarmale and accompanying polenta are cold to the touch (!), having been feebly micro waved a few seconds. When I tell the waitress, she looks at me coldly, takes my plate into her hands and says, “but, sir, the plate feels warm underneath.” Perhaps this is true, since microwaves heat ceramic plates before they heat the food slopped upon them. The implication? You are wrong, dear customer, since there’s no way you could be right.
Which bring us to today: the scenario, or, a typical day in our restaurant lives in Bucharest:
I have graded essays all morning in a Bucharest café, drinking very good espresso (which, alas, I had to go to the bar to order, since the waitress ignored me for at least 45 minutes until I did), enjoying the sunshine at my outdoor table. I meet Kerry at 12:30 so we can have a bite of lunch together before picking up Sophia from school a bit later on. Since we’ve got almost two hours, I suggest we try out a little Mexican stand that’s looked mildly appealing to our expat eyes these past months, even if it is a bit of a walk...
First Stop: the Mexican stand looks remarkably like a little outdoor taqueria in the U.S., with a steam table proffering various kinds of braised flesh and bean accoutrements, not to mention rice. There's an actual Mexican man in a sequined white mariachi suit, with matching sombrero, who sits outside this place every day, lending the place a paradoxical mixture of kitsch and authenticity. When we step up to order and find the menu baffling (it lists more Romanian food than Mexican food), I turn to him and make small talk in my entirely passable Spanish, then explain to him that we’d like an order of chicken tacos and a cheese quesadilla. “No problemo,” he assures us, but the employees behind the counter can do nothing but shove refrigerated, pre-made tacos in our direction (am I supposed to microwave these here on the street? eat them cold?) and they refuse to concoct a quesadilla, since it is not listed on the menu. The mariachi-man, though he is the owner, fails to convince his employees to do otherwise, so we give up and stroll on…
Second Stop: a little “Pizzeria Napoli” which has a good-looking wood oven and nice looking pizzas. They have no seating here…you just step up to the counter and order. Some guests eat their pizza right there. I order two little pizzas, worried a little about the time, until she assures me they’ll be ready in “ten minutes.” We wait, and wait. The woman who took our order smiles at me occasionally through the window, acknowledging the fact that we are waiting. Twenty minutes later, when I step from the street up to the counter, I see fifteen pizzas being assembled on the counter. Our two pizzas are only now about to be put in the oven. Rather than expedite orders as they came in, three people have haphazardly assembled fifteen raw pizzas in twenty minutes without putting a single one in the oven. “Only ten more minutes, sir,” she pleads, when she sees that I’ve noticed their incompetence. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, “but we had to leave five minutes ago to pick up my daughter from school.” “Shame on you, sir!,” she hollers at me when I leave without paying.
Third Stop: now very hungry, Kerry goes off to fetch Sophia and I take the now sleeping Alexander to a nearby pizzeria on Dorobantiler where we’ve had one decent pizza a few weeks earlier. I order two simple pizzas and even watch them being assembled (rather well, it appears) and even fed into the oven. My hopes have been raised! By the time Kerry and Sophia arrive, our pizzas are delivered to the table. They are completely charred: the little bit of proscuitto on each piece is utterly blackened and the mushrooms are curled into little charcoals. But we decide to try it anyway. To our surprise, the dough on the bottom hasn’t even been cooked, so we have been served burned ingredients on top of raw pizza dough. Since I own a pizza oven I know this is a sign the oven was turned on just to cook our pizzas, which means the floor was improperly primed and the top heat was too intense. This is the most basic rule of managing a pizza oven. And yet the place has five other tables, so it’s not as if they opened just for us.
We each finish our pieces, thinking how much we’ve been through to get lunch, thinking we might as well just tough it out. But it becomes impossible to go any further and I am provoked to take the pizzas back (needless to say, there is no sign of our waitress, no attempt to see if what we were served was to our liking).
Me: “These pizzas are unacceptable, burned on top, raw on the bottom,” I show her and her two managers. They nod, apparently in agreement.
“Do you want a new pizza?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say, “we are hungry.”
“Ok, sir,” she replies, “but we will need to charge you for the pieces of this pizza you already ate.”
“You want to charge me for undercooked, disgusting pizza?,” I retort.
“You did eat it,” she says smugly.
“Well, wouldn’t you try food served to you in a restaurant before sending it back? This is the restaurant’s problem, not mine. Please don’t punish me for that.”
“Actually, sir, it’s nobody’s fault,” she replies with complete seriousness, “We don’t get much business this time of day, so the oven isn’t as hot as it should be.”
Which means: the customer must share all faults with the kitchen. Bad food is a shared responsibility, not something that can be blamed on the oaf who can’t cook a pizza or the waitress who serves an undercooked pie or the restaurant who hires such uncivilized morons.
We storm out, refusing to pay for anything but the Stella Artois and the orange juice, complaining our way down the street toward home.
All this activity prompted Sophia to ask one of her usually profound, basic questions: "Daddy, this is a pizza parlor, why don't they know how to make pizza?" Granted, she has been spoiled by our kitchen...
Waiters and waitresses in Romania are almost categorically unfriendly, surly, idiotic, inefficient, and often down-right asinine. They worry about meticulously pouring out every beverage you order for you (as if this is the essence of French style), but have no concept of timing (so everyone’s entrée arrives simultaneously, for example) or graciousness. One becomes hesitant to ask for anything, since every request is met with a scowl. Touring Romania with my family was embarrassing (until we reminded ourselves that we were not responsible for the incompetence of the Romanian restaurants to which we delivered them) and frustrating since, as my brother puts it, "if only they knew we were the best tippers in the world!"
Waiters are paid a set wage in Romania and in general Romanians don't tip; considering the service, that's no wonder. This creates a vicious cycle of apathy and dread on the part of waiters and reciprocal dread on the part of patrons.
There are exceptions to all this badness. There’s our man, Dan, the elegant and sublime maitre d. at French Bakery, who has his place marked out among the sacred pantheon of waiters. And there was the pretty blonde waitress who smiled at us and served us efficiently at Bistro del Arte in Brasov two weeks ago. There are a few others here and there. No doubt we're not the ONLY people handing out substantial tips to these professionals.
Beyond the two of them, there’s an unsmiling horde of nasties who deserve some special torture in one of Dante’s Infernal circles. What was it he did to those who treat guests with disrespect?
Crankily, hungrily yours,
C
We have departed. Our Bucharestian adventure has come to a close with big doses of the good and the, well, evil...
