Catering in scotland magazine
Editor's Welcome
Here
we go; another moan about substandard Scottish hospitality. I don’t want to whinge and be all cynical but after
a weekend break in Elgin
at the end of July, I can’t really help it.
The
staff in the hotel were pleasant enough (most of them), and the optional room
service dinner on the Friday was actually first class. Alas, breakfast the
following morning was not.
With
no buffet to speak of (something of a relief) I ordered some haddock and poached
eggs, plus some ham and cheese from the Continental menu. The response from the
waiter was resolute and grim: ‘You’re not
allowed that,’ he said. At first I thought he was joking.
Then,
in the same huffy tone, he clarified my position, saying that I could have only
one choice of main dish, and that I
was not ‘permitted’ to have a second. Well, pardon me for spending a large portion of my son’s inheritance on two nights
in your hotel.
Worse was to follow. Although my rations were a bit clammy, they weren’t quite as wretched as my wife’s ‘Full Cooked Breakfast’. This horror of festering, processed carrion featured saturated bacon, flaccid potato scones, carbon-dated black pudding and two offensively low quality sausages filled with what I can only assume was mashed horse. Now, I’m no critic – I’m not even a good cook! – but you’d have to be clinically dead not to notice how bad the food was here. I felt like AA Gill at Little Chef.
The waiter wasn’t much cop, either. After witnessing my disbelief when he refused me the second course, he could have rescued the situation with a simple, light-hearted ‘Well sir, we don’t normally do that for guests but seeing as you’re hungry, I’ll see what I can do’. I daresay most people wouldn’t ask for two dishes in the first place but for those who do, it would no doubt foster a certain degree of goodwill for them to know they had received special treatment by the waiting staff. Instead, the grumpy old curmudgeon just shrugged and stomped off to the kitchen.
And then it dawned on me; the management just didn’t care about guests who weren’t paying extra for something. The reason we had received such a high standard of food when we arrived was simply because we were paying an additional premium for it. But if hotels are hoping to woo guests with first impressions, and then keep them impressed for the duration of their stay, wouldn’t it be easier to serve food of a consistent standard (and by that I mean edible) for the duration of one’s stay? It was glaringly obvious in this case that cost had been placed firmly before quality and that was a shame, as the kitchen team clearly had the capability to produce top class fare when it suited them. But why does it have to be like this? Why ruin a perfectly good, hard-earned reputation by cost cutting at the most basic level? It’s like they were saying: ‘Sorry, sir; if it’s not included in your staggeringly overpriced nightly rate, then I’m afraid it’ll either cost extra, or it’ll be shit. The choice is yours, but you can’t have both.’
Now who’s the cynic?
Alex Buchanan
