Eating My Words – Ewan McDonald

GENTLE READER, you may feel I’m being harsh here. After all, you may say, it’s a seaside town on a Saturday night in midwinter. Give’em a break.

But hear me out. This is a town where many well-heeled (and well-groomed, and well-dressed, and even better motored and boated) Aucklanders own holiday homes. They spend a good many weekends here. It is also a place promoted to overseas visitors.

Frankly, I’m over this very Kiwi approach to service. In fact, this place took the Kiwi approach to its ultimate: it was largely DIY. The person who’s not to blame is the waitress. Our hearts went out to her even before she dropped a tray of glasses and crockery on the flagstone floor.

It’s the management that couldn’t give a fig (assuming they knew what one looked like in its natural state, or where to source it, or what to do with it) about the food, the cooking, or their patrons’ experience.

Keeping the customer dissatisfied is all too common in our “service” industries. There’s an island not far off Auckland that specialises in it. To think that we’re worried about whether we’ll have enough Parties Central, or hotel beds, or buses, for the Rugby World Cup visitors. We should be worried about what, and where, they’ll eat. That goes in spades for all the other tourists who save for months to get to this side of the world. And the backbone of our
eating-out business: the locals.

AS WE PAID and left, I did some mental arithmetic. “We won’t be coming back tomorrow night,” I told the others. “Go figure,” said Eamonn.

“Already have,” I said. “It’d be $170. It’s a public holiday and they’d add 15 per cent for the service.”

“There’d have to be some first,” said Jude.

The holiday surcharge crept in when the Clark Government amended the Holidays Act in 2003. Staff had to be paid time and a half and were entitled a further day’s holiday for working on a public holiday.

Mostly as a political protest, to a lesser extent as a way to pay the wages, many in the hospitality industry started to charge a 10 or 15 per cent public holiday surcharge on top of menu prices.

The chicken – or anything else on the menu – has come home to roost. TV3 reports “a new poll” (no, they didn’t say, and I can’t find the source anywhere) shows 70 percent of New Zealanders will avoid places with a holiday surcharge.

TV3′s anonymous survey indicates:

• 40 per cent of New Zealanders still go out to eat on public holidays, but avoid places with surcharges.

• 33 per cent say a surcharge deters them from going out altogether.

• 27 per cent say surcharges have no impact on what they do.

In response Mike Egan, the Restaurant Association president who runs The Arbitrageur and Osteria del Toro in Wellington and the Monsoons Poon in Wellington and Auckland, wrung out the 10-year old dishcloth that, while some cafes in busy areas can afford to open without a surcharge, others have no choice but to charge extra – or close.

Egan told TV he believes customers don’t mind paying extra as long as they get a quality experience. “I don’t think it’s the most important thing at all. New Zealanders are widely travelled and they understand restaurants work on tiny margins and anything that upsets those has a huge detrimental effect.”

Sorry, Mike. That poll, and any number of consumer forums on dining and travelling websites, and letters to the editors, indicates your punters do mind. Nor do they buy the story that it’s common practice overseas – because it ain’t.

For far too many years, I’ve worked in an industry that couldn’t survive, or meet its clients’ and the public’s expectations, without vast numbers of folk from different trades and professions working on public holidays.

You expect a daily newspaper to come out on the day after Labour Day, or Queen’s Birthday, or Anzac Day, with photos of people at the beach on Labour Day or at war memorial parades on Anzac Day.

That means journalists, photographers, editors, production staff, press crews, delivery truck-drivers and runners have to work on public holidays.

You don’t pay an extra 50c for your paper. The advertisers don’t get charged an extra 10 per cent for their space. It’s part of the annual, expected, budgeted cost of running a business.

Same goes for … oh, just about any enterprise that opens on a public holiday.

Why should cafes and restaurants be any different? Particularly when there are more people out and about with discretionary time on their hands?

If they’re still whinging about the Holidays Act, the restaurateurs and café proprietors need to move on. If they’re not, they’re gouging us. My protest against their protest is not to go into any eatery or drinkery that imposes a surcharge – and I’m clearly not alone.

Eating My Words: Ewan McDonald

THE restaurant-café-bar had been empty but for three or four blokes playing pool and one barmaid (are we still allowed to call her that?) polishing her nails rather than the boss’s glasses when we dropped in a couple of hours earlier to see if we needed to book for dinner.

You know the time and place: seaside, north of Auckland or any other city, baches, holiday weekend, not too many places open, best not to take the chance. “You don’t really need to book,” said the barwoman, “but I’ll pencil in your name anyway. Seven o’clock?”

This being New Zealand on a holiday weekend, it was raining cats and dogs and blowing something far more zoological by 7. John le Carre’s world-weary spy George Smiley reckons there is nothing so depressing as a seaside town in the rain; I have often tried to beat Smiley, or le Carre, to the outcome of a story but this time I was quite happy to give him the last word.

The carpark was now full and we had to walk all of 20 seconds to the door. Inside, we realised why: the bar was throbbing. Not that it was the only place in town, nor the only one open, but they had a touring band playing at 9. We slithered out and across the hall to the restaurant half of the café-bar-restaurant trilogy. It wasn’t throbbing: one of we four, Eamonn*, is a doctor but he was off-duty so I didn’t think I should ask if he could detect a pulse.

Two families filled 12-seater tables. A couple left as we arrived but I’m sure it was nothing personal. In the corner sat a man alone. Very Mulgan.

The menus and wine list were on the table which saved the lone 16-year-old waitress one task.

Being by the water – well, the tide was lapping just past the petrol station and across the mangroves – there was much seafood. It came in chowder and fritters and beer batter and pan-fried.

The other three were determined: I thought about steak, making the point that the seafood had probably also come up State Highway One, possibly a day or three earlier than us. “Fish of the Day” could mean they’d cooked the box of hapuka on Thursday and the John Dory on Friday. On most New Zealand menus, “fish of the day” is right up there with “Chef’s Salad, freshly picked from our garden” as a breach of the Trade Description Act.

But there was plenty of choice: you could order fish or steak with fries and salad or mash and veges.

Sandy* went to the counter and brought us four glasses of water. The waitress found our table and took our order. Pretty straightforward though someone wanted kumara chips instead of mash but with the veges and not the salad, that sort of thing.

Five minutes later the waitress came back for the drinks order. Ten minutes later Sandy decided she’d watched the wine, and glasses, sitting on the counter long enough and went up to collect them. Just as the waitress emerged from the bar with Eamonn’s beer. Well, almost: he’d asked for Mac’s Black, they’d run out and substituted Monteith’s Black. Already opened, figuring he was a Kiwi and wouldn’t complain. Eamonn is not a Kiwi.

Sometime during the 30-minute wait for our meals Jude stoked the fire (and I mean that in a strictly Promethean way) because there’s nothing worse than being cold and hungry and if we couldn’t do much about one we could relieve the other.

Sandy noticed that Mum, Dad and four kids at a table across the room had meals in front of them but weren’t eating, figured they were missing a set of cutlery, so took one to them from an empty table. “Oh no,” said Mum, “we’re still waiting for one meal.” The last supper arrived in the bat of an eye, assuming that it takes a bat about 10 minutes to blink.

It was now time, or well past time for our meals: I was not disappointed in the gurnard, because I’d expected to be. Nor in the white sauce with something that may once have been genetically related to parsley. Nor in the mash, apart from it not being kumara chips.

Jude and I realised why they hadn’t specified the cuisine style of the vegetables when they were served in little dishes atop the dinner plate. You’ve beaten me to it: the cauli and carrot and broccoli had been cut or peeled much earlier in the proceedings and microwaved, though possibly someone had punched “00:2″ instead of “2:00″. Never mind, I like ‘em barely cooked and crunchy.

Sandy probably won’t mind me revealing that she likes to chat over the dinner table and has a thing about waiters trying to take her plate away while she’s in full conversazione. She had no worries about that here.

We split the bill: four mains, one enjoyable bottle of pinot gris, duly enjoyed: $73.50 for each couple.

TO BE CONTINUED

* Names have been changed to protect their credit cards