Not-So-Fine-Dining

A little part of December that I forgot to address in the above post is as follows:

Glen and I decided to go for a nice lunch in Akaroa on our last day of flower picking. First up, you must be filled in on Akaroa itself. It is a very cute little town situated right by our flower farm that, sometime during the 1950’s, discovered it’s French colony roots – and the marketability thereof. So it is the quintessential sea-side tourist town further coloured with cheesy, grammatically incorrect business names, including:
-L’Essence (the Shell gas station)
-L’Hotel and Le Restaurant
-C’est Bon Boutique
-Le Bons Bay
-Le Bon Accord
-Le Mini Golf

In the spirit of tourist township, everything in Akaroa is really, really expensive. We knew we’d be paying through the nose for our lunch, but decided that it was all part of sampling the local flavour, no pun intended. Our original choice of restaurant was closed for a private function, so we went to a nice looking place called Ma Maison, which was relatively un-crowded and was situated smack on the harbour. The place smelled tasty, has great views, and we would actually be able to get a table. Score.

We ordered coffee, which came in tiny little mugs and cost around four dollars each. We ordered an appetizer, fresh baked bread served with a hummus dip and a smoked cheddar dip. There was about two tablespoons each of dip and five small pieces of bread. Cost: eight dollars and fifty cents. Glen ordered a chicken sandwich - $18.00. I decided that we wouldn’t spend all this time living on a harbour and not have fresh fish at least once. So I ordered the catch of the day, which was a grouper served over what they described as a mash of some description. Cost: $22.00

'That had better be bloody good fish,' Glen and I said to each other.

The food came out. The dip and bread was over priced and delicious. Glen’s sandwich looked and smelled delightful, although the chips served alongside it were the Mcain’s frozen shoestring variety instead of proper house chips. My muchly anticipated fish arrived…and it was a little triangle about the same size of a small Captain Highliner fishstick perched on top of a round of potato salad – not mash – that was about an inch thick and two inches in diameter. And over all this bounty was poured about a cup of viciously flavoured mayonnaise. One cup of mayonnaise for five small mouthfuls of food. It was revolting.

I attempted to scrape the mayonnaise off the fish and then off the potato salad (didn’t work particularly well), then tried to lift the potatoes out of the mayonnaise (that didn’t work either, the little potato round fell apart). I sampled a tiny bit of the potato salad, and was horrified to discover that it was made with Dijon mustard; I hate horseradish, and can detect it in dijon mustard from a mile away. Had I read on the menu that the “mash” contained Dijon flavouring or horseradish, I never would have ordered it, but such information is apparently not a worthy menu addition. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to choke down that salad, which meant that three quarters of my meal was inedible. I tried a very, very small bit of the fish. It was light and would have been quite tasty if it weren’t for the mayonnaise that slathered it. The meal was substandard, poorly designed and constructed, of stingy portion, and not worth the price.

So we tried to send it back. I politely gave the waitress my reasons (leaving out the fact that it simply wasn’t worth the price) and she went to talk to the chef. When she returned she cheerfully informed me that the chef could re-make the fish without the mayonnaise, but not the potato salad, because I had eaten some of it and it doesn’t contain any horseradish, just a special kind of mustard. I replied that I had eaten about one small potato square, not even a forkful, and the “special mustard” that it contains is Dijon, which contains horseradish. Besides, the fish was the most edible thing on the plate, now that I had shovelled off the mayonnaise, but the potato salad was simply beyond reconciliation. I said that I would rather just be made another dish, preferably the same sandwich that Glen was eating as it was quite good. The waitress went back to the kitchen, and came back out saying that the fish had already gone through on the bill so they wouldn’t be able to deduct the four dollar difference between the fish and the sandwich, and that I’d have to wait a few minutes to get the new order. That’s fine, I replied. I had ordered the fish and there wasn’t anything wrong with the way it was cooked, just that it was so far from what the menu described that I wouldn’t have ordered it had I known what it was, and besides, I fully expected to have to wait for my new order, just like everyone else. She went back to the kitchen again, and came out to inform me that this would be acceptable and that while the charge for the fish meal wouldn’t be deducted from the bill, they wouldn’t charge me for the sandwich.

Had they charged us for the sandwich, Glen and I would have simply walked out, then and there. Sorry, kids, but if you want to play with the fancy restaurants and charge an arm and a leg for your food, it had better damn well be perfect. And if it isn’t perfect or it isn’t as you had described it in the menu, you’d better be willing to alter the order when the patron realizes that the food is completely unacceptable.

I got my sandwich, and it was good, and I thanked the waitress for being so accommodating. She did do a lot of negotiating with the kitchen to fix the problem, and I was grateful for that. But I don’t think we’ll be bothering with any of the Akaroa restaurants again – they are uniformally overpriced. We shall save our coin for the larger city restaurants.