Korean’s Are So Poor Thing

Today, a few colleagues and I decided to head to the new West Coast Plaza for lunch. It’s the newly refurbished shopping centre that used to be known as Ginza Plaza. I had the impression that the shopping centre was already more or less fully open for business, but I was quite wrong. Many shops were not yet open. As a result, there weren’t many choices to eat, and we ended up dining at this BBQ Chicken restaurant.

The Korean charboiled chicken we all ordered is pictured above. It is quite so-so only. Very average, definitely nothing spectacular. Why do I say Koreans are so poor thing? Actually it is my colleague who said that. Well… BBQ Chicken’s tagline says that they are Korea’s No 1 Chicken Restaurant. Wow. If this is the best chicken restaurant in Korea, they really haven’t eaten good chicken!

The service from this restaurant was quite atrocious. They forgot to bring one drink. This was not remedied until after we informed their staff three times. Then, it finally emerged that they had sent one of our drinks to the wrong table. They retrieved the drink from the wrong table, disappeared into the kitchen, and reappeared to serve this drink (photo on left). Now, we had joked about whether the staff will actually change the drink to a new one or not. Look at the cup. Okay, in particular, look at the straw. Do you notice that the bendy straw is already stretched out?

Seeing that the drink itself was still bubbly, we imagine that the drink was indeed changed. But what about the straw? Change drink, but not the straw?

One waiter came by and asked to clear our soup bowls. He left one behind. (The bowls are small, and he had nothing else to carry.)

That’s not all. All of us ordered the same main course, but they forgot to serve one of it. They had to be reminded twice. In fact, we had also noticed that another party that was seated way after us (like maybe 10 minutes later) were already digging well into their main course while we were impatiently waiting for ours.

Seeing that they were quite slow, we decided to ask for our ice cream desserts (which came with our set meal) to be served while we were still having our main course. We finished our main course, they cleared the table. Then, a waiter came to ask what was our dessert order. Huh?! It took them so long to figure out they missed out our dessert order!

The only thing that arrived instantly (one minute tops) was our bill.

For their sake, I hope these are just some teething problems with a new restaurant which they will remedy quickly.

(No offense intended to Koreans.)