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2017-02-03
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TL;DR: Very tasty food but dreadfully slow service and condescending managerHaving wanted to try Olive for some time, I finally went in for what I was expecting to be a relaxing Friday lunch location. Oh, how I was mistaken. The restaurant is tightly packed with tables, and coupled with its low ceilings, makes for a very loud and claustrophobic environment. This was not a deal breaker though, a noisy and cramped restaurant is par for course in Hong Kong, and the decoration is pleasant enough.Bef
Having wanted to try Olive for some time, I finally went in for what I was expecting to be a relaxing Friday lunch location. Oh, how I was mistaken.
The restaurant is tightly packed with tables, and coupled with its low ceilings, makes for a very loud and claustrophobic environment. This was not a deal breaker though, a noisy and cramped restaurant is par for course in Hong Kong, and the decoration is pleasant enough.
Before speaking on the service, I will say that the food at Olive is delicious and presented ver well. Our table ordered off the lunch menu and we had the Greek Salad and Haloumi with Roasted Figs (amazing) for starters, and the Roasted Chicken and Chicken Souvlaki for the main course. Everything was superb and reasonable, $300 between two.
Unfortunately, my whole dining experience (and countless others at the restaurant I'm sure) was marred by the extremely slow service. Olive is detrimentally understaffed and has clearly overstretched itself.
First of all, as mentioned before, it has packed as many tables as it could fit into its restaurant, thereby maximising client intake. Look, I'm not against Olive trying to make as much money as it can, and if your service and kitchen can keep up with the amount of orders with those added tables, then go ahead and pack us in. But with only two waiters (technically there were three including the manager, but I'll get to that later), and a spare few chefs operating the kitchen, everything took forever to reach the tables. We ordered at 1245pm but received our main course at 1:40pm, which, for a restaurant operating a lunch service on weekdays, is quite unacceptable; we didn't leave until 2pm. The two waiters, both of whom were working to the best of their abilities, were frantically running around the restaurant trying to do their jobs; it was extremely stressful watching them, and many diners, sensing the two waiter's stress levels, held back from asking from where their food/utensils/menu/water were. I mean, I only really raised my hand when I was dying of thirst and the tap water I ordered 20 minutes ago still hadn't been served. The unrest produced by the slow service was palpable.
To add to the chaos, I saw the restaurant actively taking and preparing orders from Food Panda. Again, Olive has every right to sell its food through whatever channels it wants, but it shouldn't come at the cost of your eat-in diners.
Now the manager (or who I assume was the manager). Hoo boy. A competent manager would've been able to assuage the tension felt from both the diners and the waiters, and also prioritise eat-in orders over Food Panda orders. This manager was not that. This manager was condescending and seemed to barely help his poor waiters in serving the dishes. He would walk around and tell those diners politely holding their hands up to wait two minutes, and then would never come back; it was like he was actively avoiding interaction with diners. He didn't once help pour water, take orders/questions, talk to diners, he excelled at putting his hand up and patronisingly telling customers to wait a moment; it was very off-putting.
张贴