I quite inadvertently upset a customer last night, within minutes of arriving at the restaurant. When she and her partner arrived, shortly after I had also got to work, I took them down to the table noted in the book as being for them, but she didn't sit down at the table I'd indicated, and said that she wanted to sit at that table over there. I told her that I couldn't shift her to that table becos although it wasn't occupied at that point, it was in fact booked, and the customers were due to arrive shortly.

She remonstrated with me further, and it wasn't me who placated her, but rather her partner, who had already sat down, and told her that he was perfectly happy with the table, and that she should sit down. She did, but she wasn't happy. As the evening unfolded, they enjoyed the food and Roz's service and left the restaurant happy, but that isn't what always happens on the rare occasions when we get people who want to move from the table they've been allocated.

Sometimes their sense of affrontery at not getting what they want, means that they don't relax at all.

It is a connundrum for us, becos we are dealing with a restaurant full of people and if everyone wants to sit at the same table, we are going to inevitably annoy those who don't get it.

I have to confess I don't understand why it becomes so important for some people, usually who've never been before,  to sit at certain places in the restaurant, and it becomes more complicated for us, becos what is desirable for some is not for others. We have good customers who like sitting in the back room, and we have others who prefer the relative privacy of sitting on table 1,2 or 3 which are up by the kitchen door. Yet others prefer to sit in the internal part of the restaurant, on table 4 or 5.

With most of our good customers, I've learnt their preferences over the years, and one of the first things that I do when I get to work at nite, is to consult the book. In the book are written the names of the bookings, the number of people coming, the time they're due, and contact details. At some point usually Rhonda, or maybe one of the other staff has gone thru and allocated table numbers to those bookings. I double check those tables, and occasionally rub out what has been written and change the table numbers. I move tables for a whole host of reasons, but some nites it becomes a game of jigsaw, and we try to do it in an unobtrusive manner.

But every so often we get someone who doesn't want to play ball and sit where they've been shown, and resolving that solution is never as easy as just moving them to where they want to go, becos more often than not the table they want has been allocated to someone else.

Sometimes when people ring to make bookings they indicate that they want to sit at certain tables, and I've told the staff never to promise anything, becos we genuinely can't guarantee tables. And again thats not becos we're deliberately aiming to be obnoxious, but becos we genuinely don't always know when people make bookings what the table configuration on a particular nite is going to look like.

The table set up is not the same on two consecqutive nites, becos the numbers of people vary constantly. The reasons we don't have any fixed tables ( ie booth) is to give us as much flexibility as we can. Sometimes like last nite, we have lots of 2's, and on other evenings we may have mainly 4's and 6's, and the table sizes allow us to move things around to fit in most number variations. Rhonda is especially good at fitting in all sorts of table sizings.

But then someone might book a table for 2, and specify an area they want to sit in which is fine, only if we subsequently get a table of 20 book, and we have no choice but to put them in that area, becos it is the only part of the restaurant that can hold a 20, we would normally shift the 2 to another part, becos its usually no fun for a small table to be seated close to one that large.

And when we explain what we've done to most people they understand and appreciate the fact we've thought of their comfort. But sometimes we still get indignation, and I'm never quite sure what to make of those people. Do they actually expect us to turn down a large table, purely so they can sit at one particular table?

Even very, very good customers who come weekly wouldn't expect that kind of consideration. And I don't think other people actually do either, I just suspect they're not considering any ramifications outside of their own perspective. And that is where it gets tricky for us, becos we need to balance the needs of everyone in the restaurant, alongside the practical implications of where we can fit tables, and sometimes in doing so there is some collaterol damage.

I guess it comes back to the old saw ' you can't please all the people all the time'.

Too true.

'Excuse me dear, but there seems to be some dirt on the bottom of my dessert plate'.

A lovely older couple in for dinner recently, had eaten their way thru the menu, and appeared nicely content with the food, except that when I went to clear away her brulee plate, she patted me on the hand and pointed to the black fleck residual from the vanilla, and made the comment above.

I explained that the fleck had nothing to do with incompetent dishwashers and was in fact vanilla, but I'm not totally sure I convinced her, although she seemed very happy  when they came to subsequently leave, and I just have to hope, I guess, that she doesn't go on to tell her friends what she thinks the deposit on the bottom of her dessert plate was.

Using real vanilla means that you end up with a black fleck in your custard or dessert, and I guess for those who are only used to using vanilla essence it may be a bit startling to discover it, becos it does look very much like dirt.


I mentioned that particular episode in the cookschool today, as Rick was scraping down a couple of the Heilala pods to add to the creme anglaise he was making for the Floating Islands. Everyone laughed becos the people who've been coming to cookschools for awhile are well indoctrinated to the idea of using real vanilla, either in pod or paste form, and fully understand the significance of the black fleck.

Perversely and in complete contrast to that lady, if I ever have a custard style dessert in another restaurant, and the telltale sign of vanilla fleck isn't there, then it would constitute a negative to my mind, becos it would indicate, that maybe the chef doesn't care enough to use real vanilla, and given that vanilla is one of my most favourite aromas that would definitly not be a good sign.

The moral of the story however I suppose, if there need be one, is that you can't always win, and thats OK.

( Ricks version of the floating islands. We were told by a lady from Luxembourg who was in the class today, that traditionally she would expect more of the creme anglaise, proportional to the snow eggs. I could go along with that, becos I think that everything tastes better with creme anglaise!! Every dessert that is...)

We had a complaint last nite from a lady who said that her chicken main course was 'tough'.

Always a hard one to respond too, becos how do you define 'tough' or 'chewy' - one persons definition is not going to be anothers.

In this particular instance however, I was able to feel justifiably aggrieved becos it had so happened that I had been the one to take the food to the table in question, and as I picked up the chicken main in the kitchen, I paused to comment to John on just how good it looked.

Cooking chicken breast in particular is especially hard to capture right, and during a busy service, a delay of a few minutes on going mains on a table can be all it takes to tip a perfectly cooked and still juicy breast into starting to dry out. The reason I commented was becos I could see the juice glistening where John had cut thru the breast to place it on the plate, and it looked juicy and delicious.
 

The woman who complained didn't leave much uneatened but I tryed a little of what she did, and just shook my head in bewilderment, becos there was simply no way, I thought, anyone in their right mind, could attach the adjective 'tough' to that piece of meat. But I've been around long enough now to now that reason doesn't always apply.

We use free range chickens. They are chickens that have been allowed to move around and in doing so they develope muscles and not as much fatty tissue, compared to the poor birds that spend their short ghastly lives, restrained to absolutely no movement in cages. The flesh from those animals is soft, and marshmellowy and tasteless, and for all those reasons we prefer not to use them. But they are what most people buy in the supermarkets, and are what they are used to eating.

I don't however see my role at the restaurant at nite to hector people. ( I save that for cookschools, where I get to rant unimpeded, although occasionally I do get corrected, by someone who knows more than me on a particular subject!) I don't even think we write free range on the menu, becos we assume that the people who know us, understand that we care about what we do, and are decent people at heart and are therefore intent on sourcing the best ingredients that we can. We don't feel that people need to read all about that philosophy when they come out for a relaxing dinner with friends.

  I don't like using our beliefs as a marketing gimmick, becos I figure it should, and does, go without saying for most people. That is the way we operate, to the very best of our current knowledge and skill level.

But. There are a whole host of people out there who have got used to eating chicken and other meats that are so soft that they've forgotten how to chew. And unfortunetly they've absorbed the insidious message that soft denotes quality and if meat requires chewing is must be either inferior or badly cooked.

I still remember the sense of shock I had when I ate my first free range chicken in France - after years of reading about these mythical creatures in cookbooks by the famous people  I revered, who uniformly raved about the taste of the Bresse chickens. They did have more flavour than the chickens I was up until then used to eating, but what gave me pause, was the texture. The meat didn't just dissolve in my mouth, I actually had to move my jaws and masticate, and I wasn't used to doing that with chicken, and I wasn't sure I liked the fact that I had too.

So I pondered that. These chickens are free range - they move around and in doing so create firm flesh, and that in turn means that I had to chew. And was that such a bad thing? As I weighed up the pros and cons, I decided that it actually wasn't, and it was more a fact of what you were used too, rather than necessarily a perception of good and bad.

That is in large part the reason that we now serve fillet steak at the restaurant rather than sirloin. Rick and I personally prefer sirloin becos it has more flavour, but we found the number of people who objected to its texture wearying. So we serve fillet, becos it is uniformally a softer piece of beef.

Public perception is changing. There is an ever growing awareness about how wrong feedlots and cage farming for all animals is. Restaurants tend to be at the forefront of that movement, and that can make life a little tricky sometimes when you're feeding people who haven't read the latest articles on the internet like I have.

The foodie literate segment of the market is still a minority in this town. We are catering to a wide range of people, some of whom percieve quality purely in terms of how much food is on their plate and what it cost them. The quality of life that the animal who died so that they could eat its flesh may have had, is of absolutely no concern to them at all, and for me to interject with a complaint like we had last nite, and try and explain, would resolve absolutely nothing. In fact it would worsen the situation, becos she would become hellbent on proving that she was 'right' and I was most definitly 'wrong'.

The customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer is patently wrong. But people who describe food at Somerset as 'disgusting' are people that don't want to engage in a rational discussion. They have a bone to pick, and I can only fantasise about why should be, but I have learnt from experience that if I try to explain, then all I achieve is an explosion in bile, that splatters everywhere and leaves all of us feeling somehow defiled.

And looking at that face last nite, I knew we didn't stand a chance, so I didn't bother to go there and instead simply said that  we were sorry she didn't enjoy it, and restrained from responding to her further rant and moved on. Becos sometimes you need too to stay sane.

You can't, and you won't, please everyone. It is a mantra that food operators need to remember, otherwise they get taken down by people with a pretty miserable axe to grind. And that can take all the joy out of life.

Now having got that of my chest, I'll go and have a shower. Picked Rick up from the airport early this morning - he's been down in Christchurch for Courteney who raced in the Elite Road Race yesterday, and flew home early so as to be back for a catering job we have for special friends in Waihi at lunchtime. The truck is packed, and its nearly time to head away...

Judy had to pat down some customers ( metaphorically speaking!), who bristled on Saturday nite becos the menu they were handed when they sat down was not exactly the same as the one they had looked at on our website, prior to coming to the restaurant.

And that bothered them. I felt their sense of bother was a little disproportionate to what the situation warranted, but needless to say it did prompt me to contact Simpson Print yesterday and get an updated copy of the lunch and dinner menu sent thru in pdf files so I could download them on to the website. Something I'd been intending doing when the new menu went on, on Friday nite, but had got sidetracked by all the other stuff that goes on this time of year.  Conscious however,  that it was my fault entirely that the menu on the website wasn't completely uptodate. Thats one of my jobs.

Rick had made a few changes to the menu last week - nothing too major - a couple of mains, and one dessert - but the table was quite correct in saying that the printed menu wasn't exactly as per the one on the website. It is now, becos I've just downloaded the correct menus.

But! When Rick rang to order some berries from Somerfields this morning, as we were expecting they are not able to supply, becos the days of constant rain, have played havoc with their crop, and that means that tonite in the restaurant we will probably replace the berries with fresh cherries that are due to arrive from Central Otago. And that is something we will verbally tell customers- it won't be printed on the menu.

And I have to confess that I don't see that as a bad thing - the change that is. The fact we can't get berries, and that Somerfields is being hammered by weather in what is their busiest selling week in the year, is horrible. But the fact are menu will have a slight variation becos we try hard to use the best ingredients we can, and when circumstances work against us, replace them with something else - no, that I don't view as a negative.

BUt unfortunetly not everyone sees the world in the same way I do, which means that not everyone is going to agree with me! You get that!

We have a function on tonite, for which I'm hoping that everyone will be able to sit outside - on the deck and in the courtyard. Anna Robertson and team are currently over at the restaurant creating their own special blend of magic - hanging things from the maple tree and putting up fairy lights and candles and other visual treats.

Hopefully the weather will play ball, but not feeling quite as optimistic as I did on top of the Mount early this am, where the skies looked nice and blue. Cloud is currently rolling in , and I'm in 'hmmm...'mode at the moment.

Will just have to wait and see....Be such a shame if after all this  effort, people don't get the opportunity to enjoy what Anna has created - but...

Courteneys home for the weekend and she and I are going to have a mince cooking experiment shortly - as she starts to feel her way into cooking at the flat. Ironically have just read a Michael Ruhlman blog where the commentary is all about how important it is to teach your children to cook, and so far that is something we haven't really focused on with our two. Courteney makes sensational cupcakes - but has never shown much inclination towards savoury cooking, but needs must, and now she's fending for herself, she's starting to look at ways she can do it easily and nutritionally and we're happy to help.

But I digress...

we have a staff member who's pregnant with her second child, and I asked Vicki the other day what type of information she was getting from the Ministry of Health about eating whilst pregnant, becos we have had a run of pregnant women in the restaurant recently, in itself not unusual, but what has been noteworthy, is the amount of concern that some of them have expressed over what they can and can't eat.

Vicki said there is copious amounts of information.  I haven't been pregnant in 19 odd years, and I remember even back then that some of the warnings were pretty dire.

A  pregnant lady  complained last nite that she couldn't have an entree becos there was nothing on the list that she was able to eat becos she was pregnant. As Mr Ramsey would so aptly put it -  'bollocks!'

There is literally not one entree on the list that would be unsafe - no raw meat or fish, or unpastureised dairy products, so what actually is she scared off? And more importantly why is she so scared?  I didn't step in to explain that to her, becos she had made it clear it wasn't a subject up for discussion, and I don't feel its my place to intrude. But I did shake my head, and Ricks and my exchange over it, was one of discouragement. You really do wonder.

I understand the need for caution, I really do, but I do wonder about a world where we get so scared about what might possibly happen, that we avoid virtually everything except overly processed food. I just can't accept that that is a healthy approach, either on a physical level or an emotional one.

I am conscious however of a desire not to be seem to be judgemental of the decisions that other people make - each to their own, but it just seems to have been a bit of a week for it. A steak got returned on Friday nite, becos its 'welldoneness' wasn't well done enough for this lady, becos she was pregnant.

You get that!

This wasn't technically a complaint,  but I interpreted it as such becos I didn't have something the customer wanted, and I think it was a valid request. Tried to talk him into some locally produced artisanal eau de vies from Distillerie Deinlein, but he was a man on a mission, and didn't want to be sidetracked.

He asked for calvados which we don't stock - I knew that it was an apple brandy but is not one I've ever drunk, hence my attempt to get him to try one of the other Deinlein flavours although they don't do an apple. I should probably have gone and got a sample and brought it to him, becos the quality of the liquers and brandies that those guys are making are utterly superb, but I suspect we all still tend to be locked into the eminance of the European brands.

Deinlein's tangelo liquer beat Cointreu in a European based competition a few years back, which proves that what they're doing is world class. But I digress.

My gentleman who wanted  calvados then decided he wanted an armagnac, and I had to reply in the negative again ( which I hate doing!) becos we have 2 cognacs but no armagnac. He made the comment that he prefers it to only be distilled once, and I deferred to his superior knowledge on the subject, apologised for the fact we didn't have any and promised we would next time he came.

Have just been doing a little research just now to find out about both calvados and armagnac, and thought the comments in one of the articles I read on armagnac being superior in many instances to cognac becos the fact its only distilled once  means it spends longer in oak and therefore has more finesse and roundness, was very interesting. He obviously knew what he was talking about...

We don't sell alot of post dinner drinks - unlike in the European countries when they are treated as a digestif, New Zealanders aren't quite as keen to follow a meal with a liquer. Possibly becos of the alcohol content and the drink driving issues - but mainly I suspect becos we just don't have that culture.

I don't keep an extensive range of either spirits or liquers - we cover the basics and feature some special things like the Deinlein distillery, becos its local and deserving of our support, and Warren Prestons Milford Whiskey from Oamaru, but I don't get the demand for 6 different types of rum, if you follow my gist.  We just aren't a bar in that sense.

Wine is our biggest focus.

However, having said that, people asking for things that I may not have tried is often a good starting point to discover something new and I'll now be checking with some of the distributors that I deal with to get bottles of both calvados and armagnac. However I suspect I'll be starting at a lower price point than I've just seen at one retail outlet on the net, where prices of aged armagnac were over $1000 a bottle.

I don't think so. Something tells me I wouldn't sell too much...

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..