Is food service in Adelaide really poor?
This weekend just gone I was in Adelaide to play Magic the Gathering (a nerdy card game) in the Regional Pro Tour Qualifier (RPTQ) tournament. I would have loved to have caught up with @holoz0r and meet some of the other Adelaide Steemit community but I knew that my time was going to be fully occupied with team preparation and the tournament. Hopefully I can give myself an extra evening on my next trip for some Steemit socialising.
I like Adelaide and have always enjoyed my trips there, so this article is in no way a poke at the city, but I have been somewhat baffled by how poor the service is in the cafes and restaurants. On this trip there were 5 different instances at different places. I'm not going to name and shame them but I am curious if I have just been really really unlucky with almost every eatery I have been to or if this is a common experience.
- Lunch on Saturday. We went to a restaurant I had been to several times before on a previous trip for lunch with my two team mates. Last time I was in Adelaide I thought maybe they were just short staffed that week but it was the same this trip. The food was great but they had 2 staff covering food delivery, orders, seating customers, clearing tables. At any point during lunch I noticed that there was a long queue to order or a queue at the door or food not being delivered. They were at least one staff member short. They also forgot one of our sides and I notice other tables having to check on orders or drinks or cutlery.
- At dinner it got even worse. The three of us headed out to a restaurant I hadn't been to but had read good things about. It was a small place and had two empty tables. A table for 4 with a reserved sign on it and an empty table for 2 (but a reasonably large table). We suggested that we could add a chair to the table for 2 (there were spare chairs at another table) but the waitress could only respond with "that's a table for 2" and could not process that 3 people could sit at a "table for 2". So we headed to Chinatown to see if we could find somewhere with a table for 3.
- Saturday dinner attempt 2. We found a busy ramen place with spare seats in Chinatown. The waitress did not seem to be familiar with any of the dishes (or maybe even food itself) and couldn't answer basic questions about ingredients or meal composition. We ordered and hoped for the best. The food was reasonable and did seem to vaguely match what we had ordered.
- Sunday breakfast. One of my team mates headed out for coffees and breakfast. The cafe managed to get the coffee order and ingredients of his toastie wrong. It was a takeaway order so he didn't discover it until he got back to the AirBnb.
- Sunday dinner. Sunday dining in Adelaide is hard, many places are shut. We wanted to celebrate our friends' tournament victory and managed to find a Thai place that everyone liked the look of and could seat the 8 of us. They took our food and drink order and then we waited. And waited. And waited. After 45 minutes they came out to apologise that they had lost the drinks order and half the food order. After another 30 minutes they came out to apologise that they had lost the drink order again. After one and a half hours we finally started getting our food but then realised they forgot about the food orders that they had taken on the 2nd attempt with the drinks. It was only later on that I noticed that they had cut out a newspaper review for the restaurant and stuck in the window despite it giving them a mark of 6 out of 10. To give them some credit, they did comp our drinks and the meals of the guys who had to wait 2+ hours. When I was paying I also noticed the same Ubereats bags that had been there when we arrived were still on the counter. The food that we got was nice, but the ability to run a restaurant in a competent fashion was terrible.
So I'm not sure if my friends and I just got unlucky 5 times in a row or the benchmark for food service in Adelaide is low enough that places can get away with being useless. I know that if a restaurant in Melbourne was run like the ones we went to it wouldn't last a month. I'm curious if this is the experience of other travelers to Adelaide and whether the Adelaide locals notice a difference when they travel elsewhere.
You need to be familiar with the good locations in Adelaide. My wife and I rarely get bad service when we visit. I definitely haven’t had to wait 2 hours for a meal before.
The food service is very hit and miss. It depends on where you go. In some places, you get excellent wait staff who will joke with you, make great suggestions on the menu, and other places will be hovels where you point to the thing you want on the menu, and you might get one of them.
I think Adelaide's good wait staff just work at bars instead of restaurants / eateries. Next time you come to Adelaide, check out Two Bit Villains (vegan / vego place), and Peel St, which has many "Melbourne quality" eateries. Not sure about the vegan options on Peel St for you, but its got a lot to offer!
2bit villains was the Saturday lunch. Great food but that really needed another server. I will need to check out Peel st next time.
I was going to hazard a guess that was the Saturday one! :)
I last went on a Saturday evening, and it was the same, a bit of chaos - 2 people do everything - kitchen, front of house, and cooking back of house, it seemed as well.
The jackfruit "pulled-pork" they do there is really good!
To the question in your title, my Magic 8-Ball says:
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Yeah, but what about the MTG tournament? How did you go?
We came 26th out of 59, an okay result but nothing spectacular.
Not biased or anything but Melbourne has a better food culture. Even our coffee is great.
That's one thing I can't figure out, why is coffee in this country so different where you go?
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