British Bars & Cafes: are you being served?

Considering that, for many years now, so many British holidaymakers have experienced and enjoyed what France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Spain (to name but a few) have to offer, it is somewhat surprising and disturbing that our own cafes and bars have not caught up with the kind of service we have come to expect on our visits to the rest of Europe.

In these more enlightened countries you can walk into a bar or café, sit down at a table, and expect to be approached by a waiter or waitress ready to take your order. Even more impressively, if the weather’s nice you might sit down at an outside table in the middle of a town square and as if by magic someone will appear out of a doorway somewhere and be ready to serve you.

Try that in Britain. You’ll have a long wait.

I often wonder how confused our Continental visitors to these shores must be when they sit at a table and nothing happens. With any luck they will have read some tourist guide book for visiting Britain where it might have been explained to them that in the majority of cases they need to walk up to a bar or counter (and perhaps join a queue) to place their order. Only then can they confidently sit at their table and wait for their order to arrive.

Isn't it about time we rose up as a nation and demanded something better? Why do we put up with it?

The other day, in my own village, I had a bit of time to kill and so decided to play the tourist for an hour, strolling around looking at the shops. I decided to go into one café for a cup of coffee. I’d not been in there before. On entering I said “Good Morning” to a young lady clearing a table, and she responded. I found myself a table adjacent to the one she was clearing and sat down. The place was not very busy at this time. She finished clearing the table and disappeared. I sat reading my newspaper for ten minutes and was totally ignored.

I looked towards the rear of the premises and there was a service counter, and I suspected that I should have gone up to this and place an order. I didn't even to bother to investigate. I got up and walked out. I'm suggesting that this is what we should all be doing: walking out.

I found a second café around the corner, sat down at a table and was immediately approached by the lady (who ran the place) to take my order. Guess which one of the two cafes I’ll be going to next time I want a cup of coffee in my own village.

A few years ago, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair talked about introducing “Continental Café Culture” to our towns and cities. I suggest the first requirement is for café owners to provide something resembling Continental Café Service before we get anywhere near achieving a “Continental Café Culture”.  For the most part, it hasn't yet happened.

Ramada Jarvis Hotel, Blackrod nr.Bolton, Lancashire

£7 for a glass of wine? Do me a favour!

We've just returned from a 3-day break at the Ramada Jarvis Hotel at Blackrod (near Bolton) - a pleasant setting in the county of Lancashire at the foot of the west Pennines, within easy reach of the Rivington Country Park adjacent to a large water supply reservoir.

We couldn't fault the hotel accommodation and it was kept spotlessly clean, but the hotel lets itself down in the matter of food and drink. Everything we had from the menu and the wine list were second or third choices because whatever we really wanted was not available, even when the menu said it was available 24 hours a day, e.g., Kashmiri Lamb Curry. When I chose that it wasn't even available for 24 seconds.

On our first night, dinner in the "Arts Brasserie" was severely disrupted by a wedding reception, in that although we had been told we could order a meal from 6 pm onwards, this was not actually possibly until 8.30 pm.

On the second night we sat down in the brasserie, (in which there were only about a dozen other diners), but no one seemed to be getting any meaningful service. Waiters and waitresses were walking around at high speed between various parts of the hotel and the bar in the brasserie achieving God knows what, and we were totally ignored for 20 minutes, until I made a point of asking for some service. We placed our order (still no "24-hour" Kashmiri Lamb!) and had to wait another 20 minutes before being told that my choice of Starter was not available. By the time we had any food on the table we had been sitting there for 55 minutes.

I have never seen so much high-speed walking around achieving so little.

Breakfast was served in a different dining room, and the fried eggs, scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, black pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms and baked beans made an excellent breakfast, but only if you were lucky enough to be in the room when all these items were simultaneously available on the self-service breakfast bar - which wasn't very often! Most of the time, people were standing around waiting for food to appear from the kitchen, or asking the dining room staff for this or that missing item. In three days we never saw the Chef or any member of the kitchen staff check out the current state of the breakfast bar, or stock it up with anything. It was all down to dining room staff having to go into the kitchen to get more supplies as and when they could.

Stress levels were increased by the existence of a persistent high-pitched whistling sound coming from some unidentified piece of machinery, so we were all suffering from a kind of communal tinnitus.

We shall not be returning to any Ramada Jarvis hotel any time soon.