Hairy Food

May 19, 2010

I’ve been in Palm Beach for the last couple of weeks and have been a daily regular at Union Bakery, a quaint Cuban café with terrific breakfast pastries in Lake Worth on Dixie Highway.  Yesterday, a small German roach crawled across the pastries on display and fell from one rack down to the other.  After several hand motions (my Spanish is terrible), the manager turned red in the face and took away the bottom pan where the roach made his final resting place; trying to do so discretely so no other customers in line would notice (the top pan of pastries - the launching pad for the roach making his dive onto the pan below - stayed in circulation).

The experience yesterday was certainly embarrassing for the owner, discouraging and unappetizing for me, and prompted me to try out another Cuban restaurant farther down the road called Havana Café, also on Dixie Highway.

After ordering $40 in takeout (I’m hooked on the Cuban flavors and a well-done Café Con Leche), I patiently waited for my order in the area overlooking the expo kitchen and prep area.  A waiter walks down from the upstairs dining room with a returned plate of food.  It has a hair in it.  He shows a co-worker, they make a face at each other, and then he flicks out the hair and marches the same plate of food back upstairs to the guest (who thinks she has a fresh order).  I bring it to the attention of the manager and she defends the waiter saying he’s in training and she’ll talk to him, yet she doesn’t go to the table to tell the guest and lets the poor lady keep eating the contaminated food in blissful ignorance.  Apparently she didn’t want to make a scene.  Remarkable.  Two days in a row I’m floored with food safety issues at Cuban restaurants in West Palm Beach.

The stakes have grown too high these days to half-heartedly respond to customer complaints and to sweep embarrassing issues under the rug.  I have two blog posts dedicated to why, including Restaurant Complaints and Word of Mouth in the Age of Social Media.  Complaining to the manager doesn’t seem like enough in the case of the woman eating contaminated food.  I feel responsible for knowing about it and not marching to the table myself to tell the guest since the manager wouldn’t.

How about you though?  What would you have done?

When I mentioned this to a friend of mine today (a restaurant guy who owns several restaurants himself and who frequents Havana Cafe), he said "Don’t worry about a little hair.  We’ve all gotten a few short curlies in our mouths, no? Old Havana guy doesn’t like to waste anything, for sure".  He of course softened the remark with one of those little typgraphical smiley-face winks, but I think the Laissez-faire attitude is telling of how we have been conditioned to keep quiet and hold our complaints to ourselves in restaurants. 

Why and how has it become such bad form to copmlain in a restaurant even in the face of  issues that truly warrant being addressed?  It’s unpopular to complain in restaurants and I notice some feel really embarrassed when a member of a party voices a complaint.  But what of the consequences to the guests that follow behind us? 

Please let me know your thoughts on restaurant complaints and what you would have done in this case in particular with the hair.  Can't wait to hear your thoughts!