Please note that since writing this blog post, Duet has closed down
Please note that since writing this blog post, Helden has closed down
The number of establishments – be they clothing shops, restaurants, makelaars, or indeed any other service-related haven of industriousness – that I can continue to frequent is, rather worryingly, rapidly diminishing. Recently, when regaling a sympathetic interlocutor with my latest customer service woes, my tale has been greeted with nothing more than a shrug and the ubiquitous response: ‘That’s Dutch customer service for you’. Now, maybe I’m prematurely morphing into a grumpy old woman here, but at what point did I sign up to this sigh of resignation when I moved to Holland? Since when did poor customer service become something that us Amsterdammers were contractually obliged to accept – like the fact that there are no mountains, or that our ground-floor apartment might be under water by 2020?
But what to do about it? As a Brit, I find the prospect of complaining much like the prospect of skydiving: at best, stomach-lurchingly terrifying, and at worst, fundamentally impossible (hence I write useless blogs about my dissatisfaction in preference). Instead, I have made an agreement with myself never to return to shops, restaurants, bars, in which the level of service is so embarrassingly low that the staff would rather talk to the dishwasher whilst studiously ignoring me than take my money, let alone bring me a cappuccino within thirty minutes. As you might imagine, my options are becoming consequently rather limited.
Take Helden, for instance: a fashionable bar-cum-restaurant that used to go under the somewhat sexier title of Madame Jeanette. Thinking that sofas like low-slungtrousers and mojitos made by models were a pretty safe bet for a London couple I had staying with me, I booked us a table. Or rather, I didn’t, because I wasn’t allowed. On arrival, we therefore played musical tables, as the waiting staffworked out how best they could fit four people into the smallest space possible. After about an hour of this by now less than amusing little game, we ordered. Starters, once they finally deigned to arrive, were edible, if over-priced. Main courses, apparently, were off the menu. At least mine was, we discovered, after another forty-minute wait. Now, as all food lovers know, a starter, the foreplay of the meal, is ordered in anticipation of the main course, the part that penetrates the appetite. It’s unlikely, for instance, that you’d linger lengthily over an ear-lobe nibble, when all along you’re planning to have it hard and fast against a wall. Likewise, you’re hardly going to order carpaccio followed by a fillet of beef, or thai fishcakes followed by sole meuniere, unless you’re the Charles Highway of the dining room. Given that I wasn’t informed of the change to the menu until halfway though my meal, however, I had to forego the logic of choosing two courses that didn’t constitute a kind of culinary non-sequitur. Instead, in a last ditch attempt to order something that the kitchen might actually be able to cook, I ordered tagliatelle with prawns and rocket. What could possibly go wrong? Good quality olive oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, sweet roasted mashed garlic, fresh king prawns with barely wilted peppery rocket – it had the potential to be simple but sensual. Unfortunately, one of the chefs, whose favourite word I suspect might have been ‘fusion’, had an accident with a fish sauce bottle. I could have wept. Had John Torode and Gregg Wallace been there, they would have been frantically exchanging anxious (yet slightly homoerotic) glances at each other across the table whilst mentally striking the hapless chef off the quarter final shortlist. Needless to say, when our bill arrived, it in no way reflected the meal’s vital statistics: five stroppy wait staff, four unhappy customers, three tables of various sizes, two hours’ wait, and a main course full of fish sauce. As it was, all I managed to do was smile weakly, and pray that my London friends would forgive me for the horrendous error of judgement I’d made in bringing them there. Thank god my dining companions had enough balls to demand a free bottle of wine.