This is certainly not the first complaint we've ever recieved! - but thought it might be interesting to document some of the comments that we get, which give us pause to reflect, and reconsider. There are 2 types of complaints as I see it in a restaurant - those from people who have no idea what they're talking about, and who becos we don't fit their idea of a restaurant ( for example, we can't and won't serve cona coffee ), they complain - some vociferousively! Its never pleasant to listen to negativetly, but I have definitely learned over the years that there is some criticism that its OK to tune out, becos there will never be a meeting of the way.

And then there is an altogether other type of comment, where the people concerned can make a really valid remark and raise an issue that we may not have previously thought off. Rick and I have never professed to know it all - and we are constantly on a quest to improve and expand what it is that we do, so we are always open to comment.  Sometimes we agree, and sometimes we don't - but it's always useful gist for the mill.

Had an English couple in the other nite, travelling thru NZ who commented leaving, that they had thoroughly enjoyed the meal, but..! Got to watch for those buts!

Their issue was the fact that we served our cheese straight from the fridge, and they said that they used to own a restaurant, and love cheese and eat it every nite, and feel very strongly that it shouldn't be served cold. And of course they are quite correct - you get much more of the nuance of cheese flavour if it is served at room temperature. Our reality though is that our cheese sales are too erratic for it to be viable for us to bring portions out of the fridge at the start of service each nite, so that it is at the right temperature should a customer decide to order a cheese board. The wastage would be too much, becos you wouldn't be able to put that cheese back in the fridge at the end of the nite if it hadn't been ordered - it would have to be thrown away. In dollar terms thats a little scary.

The point however is a valid one. And we have gone to the trouble of sourcing top NZ cheeses, so it seems a little silly not to be serving them absolutely at their peak, and we had a lenghty discussion later that nite ( over some Waimata Gorgonzola!), about how we could circumvent the incompatibility of the 2 notions.

One of the things that intrigued us in the restaurants we ate in, in France last year, was that it was considered perfectly normal to give your dessert order at the same time as the rest of your order. Presumably becos in that culture it  is taken as a foregone conclusion that you will go right thru the menu, whereas in NZ we proffer the dessert menu after mains have been cleared away, and get declined by about 30/40% of people, who claim to be too full for dessert. We liked the idea of the kitchen knowing at the start of service what dessert orders are there, rather than, as happens in our kitchen, it been totally in the lap of the gods, becos you can never know in advance what sort of uptake you are going to get for desserts, and the percentages can vary from nite to nite.

 On the basis of that notion, Ricks suggestion, and I thought it had real validity was to make the comment somewhere on the menu, that people would read when they were ordering their entrees and mains, that it they were going to order cheese later, and would prefer to eat it at room temperature then to please let the waiting staff know when they ordered their first courses and we would ensure that the cheese was served accordingly.

No doubt we will get the odd occasion when someone will think they want cheese, order it in advance and then change their minds - becos you always get that with human beings, but on the rare occasion that that will happen we will be able to absorb the extra cheese without it being an issue.

To me its an ideal compromise - and I think we'll give it a shot when we get the new menus printed next week, with the changes Rick is currently working on, and see what kind of response we get..

An article in the regular TizWine email caught my eye today. Theres a documentary being screened on one of the Australian TV channels that we may get to see in NZ at some time, which describes in detail some of the scams happening out there in the wine world , in terms of additives been added to wines, and corners been cut all to keep costs down.

Proof enough for me to stay with the producers who I know and like and whose credibility is beyond reproach.

Thought the comments on the French Champagne pricing were interesting. We stock a Jean Jacques Vigreux Frere label, which is one of the 'garagistes' labels, that produce stunning bubbles on a much smaller scale to the large brand names and for appreciably less cost. There is alot of money tied up in  the perception of 'brand', and the Champagne houses know how to work that. We used a Bollinger Special Cuvee as one of our wines in Wine Options recently, and I was genuinely stunned that no-one picked it as a French bubbles.  So you do have to ponder whether alot of the catchet is tied up in knowing what you are drinking, rather than the taste of what you are drinking.

Hmmm...

19 September

And then as a follow up, the predictable ( to a degree) outrage from the wine industry - proving I guess that there are 2 sides to every story. And as I have a natural aversion to a lot of the hyperbole espoused in the media, I think it would be fair to say I straddle the fence on this one. I am quite sure there are examples of heinous cheating - but to tar the industry as a whole on the basis of a few rogues, is pushing common sense a little too far in the direction of sensationalism I suspect.

I am sitting at the dining room table working thru Courteneys various documentation for University next year with her. This particular daughter makes hard work of this sort of process, and likes to have someone around to check, double check and then triple check each stage. And someone to get grumpy with when things don't go quite the way she wants them too...

There have been a few digressions along the way as she collates documents and goes to find information, so I've been reading in short bits while I wait - 'The Simple Art of Marrying Food and Wine" a delightfully erratic but enormously comprehensive book written by Malcolm Gluck and Mark Hix, about that interesting world of Wine and Food matches. My interest is spiked at the moment becos we have 2 wine makers dinners coming up, and want to come up with a range of ideas that are going to be fresh and interesting, and which are going to make the wine shine. As I read, I'm sipping on a glass of the Riesling that Michelle Richardson has sent me, the only wine in her intended line up, that we haven't previously tried. A refreshing reminder of why I like riesling so much!

Having covered what I could in the book, I've been going thru some Wine websites for further information and ended up by default on one with 2 interesting articles that I thought I'd link too. The first is on what the writer expects from a good restaurant, and reading it irritated me, becos it showed how virtually impossible it is for any restaurant to please all the people all the time, becos people can't even exactly, precisely quantify what it is that they want in a restaurant. We're doomed to piss some people off, some of the time!

And the second article, refers to wine prices in restaurants and how they attempt to rip customers off. An article responded by a UK restauranteur with a pleasantly more pragmatic understanding of the reality of trying to make money in a tough industry.

Sometimes uneducated opinion, especially when originating from a self descriped expert,  does so much damage, becos all it does is reinforce existing stereotypes, and make it harder for those of us who care about what we do and who go out of our way to attempt to provide value to our customers, while at the same time making enough money to pay our bills, resent enormously, the implication that we are trying to rip our customers off.

Hmmm...

Back to Courteney... she's currently trying to find the various character references that people have written for her for a scholarship application. We're nearly done!

Rick and Courteney are over in the Waikato doing a club race at Morrinsville - Rick racing with some elite male riders, and I know he won't be able to help himself but attempt to keep up, or kill himself in the process - so I'm hoping that the rest of the kitchen staff are able to carry him tonite, becos he won't have too much energy left over I suspect. Courteney is racing against top riders in her age group aussi, and will be interesting to see how she is positioned, with Nationals not too far away. Her very spunky new wheels got put on the bike yesterday and I'm sure they'll create a huge pyschological boost to make her go faster...

Hannah did her kayaking training on the river early this morning, and then came home to collect me, and we headed over to the Mount - her to run, and me to walk, and ponder the imponderables that take up space in my brain! Brunch at Slowfish apres and a companianable chat with friends who, by happy chance ended up at the next table. Since I've got home I've been baking ginger crunch and sultana cake under instruction,  for her to take back to Auckland, tomorrow.  What would I do without the Edmonds cookbook?!

In the meantime the restaurant has been taken over by a determined band of floral artists who are weaving their particular brand of magic, and I can't wait to see the final product. Gregor and Anna arrived prior to me leaving for the Mount, and when I returned I was somewhat taken aback to see their numbers had swelled considerably - and there was a positive hive of people making stuff.  Gregor is a world reknown expert in floral art, and he's currently in NZ doing a series of seminars that Anna has organised, through her company Silver Bubbles. Tonight they come to the restaurant for their final dinner - but prior to that they will have totally transformed the area around their table. Talk about working for your supper!!

I am not especially visually creative- so I have nothing but the upmost respect for those who have those sorts of skills.  Both Gregor and Anna have been a delight to work with, and I have felt totally relaxed about standing back and letting them get on with it. Did take down a few trays of coffee, when I got back from the Mount, but beyond that have stayed out of the way. They've been warned that if they touch my precious curtains they die! - but anything else is fair game. When I flicked over just before for some flour, I noticed there was a contraption suspended from the ceiling, and all sorts of other things under construction, so I await the final result with considerable interest and anticipation.

Rhonda, our restaurant manager, has been on holiday this week, and her absence has meant I've had to step up to the plate for lots of stuff that I normally no longer have to worry about, becos its all things she takes care of now. Been a shock to my system, but nor has it done me any harm. We've carried extra staff over winter becos we employed new people back in March when it looked like we were going to be opening another business. I wanted strong staff at Somerset, so that when I got tied up in the new business, the extension wouldn't be too noticecable. It takes at least 3 months to get waiting staff trained beyond the commie stage, so we felt we needed to start back then. The new business didn't eventuate, and so I've used the opportunity of having excess staff, to pull back a bit from the coal face myself. Going over once service is actually underway, and retreating once my presence is no longer required - which sometimes has been after only an hour and a half or so. Theres always lots of other stuff I can do at my desk, so time is never wasted. Rhonda has very ablely stepped into that gap, and runs the restaurant and manages the staff with a warm manner, that Rick and I value enormously. She cares about people, and has actively encouraged a postive dynamic between the kitchen and front of house, which regretfully is not the norm in this industry.  I think shes superb, and I love the way shes always looking at ways to improve and to learn.

 We both went up to a seminar on training staff at Taste some weeks back, and she took up the idea of giving the front staff product tests from time to time. Our menu is large and theres a huge amount of background information that you need to have to cover all the potential questions that customers might possibly throw at you. That kind of detail can't be assimilated instantly ( which is why I always get antsy when I read snarky comments from some restaurant reviewers about staff knowledge. Staff have to be trained. It takes time. They don't arrive at your door fully formed and knowledgable - its a process. Good restaurants will have layers of staff out front just as they do in the kitchen, and they're not all equal. But restaurant reviewers don't seem inclined to allow latitude for nuance like that.) Rhondas done one product test - and the differing answers were very revealing, as to the amount of knowledge the staff have. I'm hopeless. If I know something, I automatically assume its obvious and therefore everyone else will know it too - and taking time out to impart that knowledge is not something that I'm especially good at. So these tests are a very targeted way of seeing what staff do and don't know, and we will  work on more training geared around that.

Its all good stuff.

Not having Rhonda there, has meant I have had to be there at the start of the nite and thru to the end -and I've even had to carry some food around the restaurant on occasion! All of which has served the useful purpose of reminding me that I actually thoroughly enjoy being a waitress. I really do enjoy people, I love the interplay with those we know really well, and then sometimes like lunch on Thurs with a table of 3 who I didn't know at all, but who were lovely, and who, when I was clearing away their dessert plates commented on the fact we present our brulees in the Parisian style, and I explained that it was an idea that we picked up at Phillipes restaurant in the Dordogne last year, and that segued into a discussion about Paris restaurants and hotels, and a really good exchange of information. Call me shallow - but I love that what I do can give people pleasure, and in return create a sense of satisfaction for me. Life can be horrendously complicated, and when you have a simple interchange with people who are on the same wave length, is can just feel so easy and simple. And nice as a result!

Which is why I read this blog written in America with a degree of morbid fascination, becos it is alien to what I do and why I do it.  Waiting tables in the States must be considered to have periously low social status, and if you read thru some of his archives where he talks about nightmare customers, you can't help but wonder why you would bother going to work if that was the crap you had to deal with every nite. We get our occasional difficult personality, who stretches our realms of understanding a titch, but it isn't frequent.  Coincidently I'm reading a book on Paris restaurants written by an American who has lived in the city for over 20 years, and one of the most important points he makes at the start of the book is that, to eat well in Paris you need to know how to behave. Restaurants are an entrenched culture in France,  and both customers and staff respect each other and work together to ensure a mutually beneficial experience. Where is comes unstuck is when tourists don't understand the rules of engagement, and try to bend a French waiter to do things like they are ' back home'.  French waiters don't like being told what to do. Actually, most of us who have any level of skill don't appreciate being patronised, and the old adage about the customer always being right is complete humbug. Sometimes I watch people who create scenes and demand stuff with real curiosity becos I wonder what it is about them that makes them unable to let us get on with what it is that we do with a reasonable level of competency.

But then it would be boring if we were all the same?!

Sultana cake to check.. and Courteneys just rung to say she won ! - which is seriously cool! Must have been those wheels.

Time to check the sultana cake...

......

My camera doesn't really do justice to the atmosphere created - it looks quite extraordinary!

Got connected to this series of photos via one of the foodblogs that I read regularly, and thought it was worth sharing becos the originality and effort that goes into these peoples lunches makes an amazing record.

As I mention quite often in cookschool, becos chicken stock seems to come up in conversation rather regularly  being a base ingredient in so much, it is not unusual for Rick and I to have stock with poached chicken and vegetables for lunches on days  when theres no classes on, but our range of lunch ideas tends to stay small and  is reasonably often repeated...

So I have to confess I was mightily impressed by these people who own an Art Gallery and who put this kind of time and effort into what they eat in the middle of the day.

Scroll down past the initial part of the webpage and you'll end up with a series of photos of "What we made for lunch".

We were in Auckland yesterday with the staff for the big Trade show, and at one point in the afternoon, before dinner, Rick and I flicked over to Mt Wellington to have a look at Farro Fresh, and did comment that a store with that kind of range, would be simply fabulous in Tauranga...and would make, making interesting lunches, so much easier... Hmm...