The Free Cake Was A Lie

My parents, aunt, and I go to have lunch at a sit-down restaurant where we’ve eaten several times before, though it has come under new management since the last time we’ve eaten there.

The place is busy, but not inordinately so for a Sunday, yet the food takes about 45 minutes to arrive. My aunt’s dish is wrong, so she tells them to take it back and make her what she ordered. She tells the rest of us to start eating since we’ve already waited so long for our food.

It takes another 45 minutes for her remade order to get served, and when it does arrive, it’s cold — it is a hot dish, not something that is supposed to be cold. She ends up eating it since she is so hungry and doesn’t trust that sending it back to be warmed will occur in a reasonable amount of time.

The waiter is rather late in coming to see if we are done and want the check. When we complain about how poor the service was, he says they’ll offer us free desserts as compensation. In what can only be some major collective gullibility, we all think that’s acceptable and couldn’t possibly go wrong. I guess we figure that there couldn’t be that much of a wait to get us already-made items like cake or ice cream.

True to form for the day, it takes about half an hour to get our comped desserts. The waiter is, again, rather slow in finally getting our check, and the desserts are on the bill at full price, so we have to get him to remove them which also takes an inordinate amount of time.

We were there for about three hours getting a set of meals that should have taken about an hour, tops. We never went back, even though it used to be one of our go-to places when we were in the area. I think it lasted for another few years before going out of business.