While we were staying in California with Dave and Jan, we took a weekend trip to the Wine Country and down the California coast to Half Moon Bay. I'll cover that in another post, but I felt that dinner needed its very own post.
It was Dave's mom's birthday, so the four of us met with her, Dave's aunt and uncle, his brother and cousin and all nine of us went to eat at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Now, I have never been to one before and when we got there it was pretty cool. It had an old British phone booth and velvet upholstered chairs in five different colors, a Catholic shrine screen... basically nothing matched and I loved it.
We were told we couldn't make a reservation (apparently, too many large parties had already reserved?) so we waited for a full hour before being seated. This wasn't really a problem because we sat in the cozily dark bar area and nursed some drinks, but by the time the buzzer went off, we were hungry and ready to go.
When the hostess brought us up to our table, though, it was set up in a hallway. No kidding! For some reason, they had put a bunch of tables together in the upstairs hallway, by the stairs. The room on the other end of the hallway was empty through our entire meal, but for some reason, they crammed us into a space barely wide enough for the tables themselves. The waitress couldn't even get to us, we had to hand drinks and food and the like down the table.
Well, Dave's uncle was having none of that. I thought it was very strange and a bit of an inconvenience, but when it comes to customer service issues, I am perhaps a bit too deferential. Uncle Vic is no shrinking violet, though and he complained to the waitress (and made sure to assure the poor girl that it wasn't her fault). She went to get her manager and Uncle Vic told him exactly what he thought of us being stuffed into a hallway.
The manager apologized and then comped the ENTIRE meal. The whole thing! I never would have had the gumption to speak up, but hey. Gets results, man.
Anywhooser,we got a free meal. So, I learned something. Eat with a disgruntled Sicilian and you get your meal free!
Thanks Uncle Vic!
(Also, thanks for letting us stay in your fifth wheel for the night, it was lovely.)
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