Breakfast at Cafe Cartel

The whole family visited Cafe Cartel for breakfast a few days ago. The kids wanted McDonalds, the Wife wanted something Chinese, and in the end we compromised. What the kids really wanted was hash brown, and Cafe Cartel does serve hash brown. (It wasn’t good enough for Vanessa though, she had to have McDonald’s hash brown…) So we sat down, flipped through the breakfast menu, and placed our orders. Pretty simple and straight forward.

Cafe Cartel has been around for many years. I’ve been a frequent customer in the past, lesser so in the recent years. Reasonable food and service for the price we’re paying. I like their bread, and eating it with olive oil, and having the bread free flow was something nice. In the past, my wife had an encounter where they simply could not get the doneness of the meat correct. That was just that one time. We would look past that and visit the restaurant again.

This visit, however, I’ve got more to complain. There is free flow coffee for breakfast. Do you know, it took them a whole 25 minutes to bring me that one cup of coffee? I don’t think I’m demanding too much, but I was rather annoyed that the coffee had to take such an eternity to arrive. Furthermore, it had arrived last, when we were almost done with our breakfast. So much for free flow… I didn’t need refills anymore.

We wanted to order an extra hash brown. This was not an item of its own on the menu. The order taker told us she would find out the cost and let us know about it. Well, apparently the extra hash brown was served together with one of our breakfast sets. She hadn’t bothered to tell us she had placed the order, and she hadn’t told us the price.

I had also noticed, while waiting for the various items we ordered to arrive, how slow some of the staff were working. There was a table next to us that needed clearing. Someone had already cleared it partially, and when this other staff arrived, there was just one plate left on the table. She was so slow fixing up the table, she literally took 2 or 3 minutes to fix up a table that only had just one plate left to be cleared!

So, my eyes wandered off and noticed the queue forming outside the restaurant. How interesting… the queue had formed despite there being plenty of tables inside the restaurant. I guess the staff were simply too slow!

I was planning to tell the cashier about my feedback when I got up to pay. Along the way, I realized… one of the hyper-inefficient staff, whom I was going to complain about, was a “supervisor”. The cashier’s rank was “crew”. Not such a good idea perhaps.

Overall, well, there’s nothing really wrong with the food. Service, however, has plenty of room for improvement.