having a few drinks at the bar saturday night, we we're hungry so decided to order some food, picked "from the sea, platter". when it was delivered we all commented that there seemed to be not a great deal of " from the sea" on he platter. when we were nearly finished the bar manager came over and insisted that the platter board was taken away, we had to load the remaining food into a bowl so the precious platter board could be presumably be used elsewhere. for $85 i would expect that the board would be left on the table until we, the customers, were finished eating the food we had paid for and would not have to manually load it into a bowl. after they left i looked again at the bar menu. the "from the sea" platter was said to contain oysters, salmon, soft shell crab - none of these were on the platter and the only item of sea food we received that was listed on the menu were mussels. i complained to the waitress who said they were sorry but some things were out of season and they must have run out of the others, soft shell crab was replaced with morton bay bugs and there was a battered fish type item on the platter but none of us could identify what it actually was. i asked for a refund and was offered a round of drinks, i said that this was not proportionate and wanted to speak to the manager only to be told he was busy upstairs, i suggested she go and fetch him. he did appear at the bar and for the first time that night i could see him serving drinks, again the waitress came over and now said that she was acting as the manager. i said it was totally inappropriate to serve a platter that has no resemblance to what is written on the menu. she said it was too hard to change the menus each season - she needs to go to any food establishment dealing with seasonal food, this is par for the territory, if you can't cope with seasonal don't go there. she was abrupt and rude with little concept of customer service and said that there was nothing she could do. the customer is always right mr carlton, especially when you are wrong and are charging $85 for a platter that simply is not what your menu specifies. the waitress continued her brick wall approach to customer service so in anger and frustration i told her to get f'ed. a few minutes later the brave and busy manager approached and asked to talk to me outside, he told me that it was not acceptable to speak to his staff that way. i started to explain that their menu misrepresented what was actually served and his professional response was - goodbye, goodbye, goodbye....
a fantastic solution, throw out someone who complains that what they ordered was not what they got. my response to the waitress who suddenly became the manager may not have been appropriate but nor is having a menu that does not represent what you deliver. yes we should have noticed the platter was not as the menus stated when it was delivered but why should we have to check and why are they still charging full price for a substitute platter that is inferior.
small point here mr carlton - your mistake, total lack of customer service to correct the situation, throw out the complainant when they get pissed off with your stonewall approach. i am looking forward to not going back to this underrated establishment with music from the 80's, a covers band that needs to go back to the 80's and a manager who is out of his depths big time.
if you want a decent platter and surroundings no4 in merrivale is the place to go, no bullshit there.