Every Friday afternoon I escape the office with one of my friends for lunch.
This is a bit of a novelty since I work through my lunch break every other day of the week but I figure if I actually do the proper lunch thing once a week I can live with it.
Each week we carefully consider our options for venues for these social gatherings of two and I must say, we’ve become connoisseurs of orange juice: some are definitely better than others and from personal experience, some blend with vodka better than others.
This past Friday we decided to wander along to a certain pub named for a beer that advertises itself as “pride of the south”. There were a few people there but it certainly wasn’t as busy as at the Kiln or Duo on a Friday.
That didn’t mean we got a table straight away … no, we had to wait for one to be cleared. And just that one, we wouldn’t want to strain our table-wiping hand by overdoing it now, would we? So lucky us, we got to sit there surrounded by the dirty dishes and half-eaten meals of earlier diners. Very appetising.
We looked at the menu and decided to simply have potato wedges. This cunning ploy was to ensure we would be in a fit state to plunder the dessert menu before leaving.
We also ordered our usual orange juices, one au naturale one with a splosh of vodka.
The juice arrived. It didn’t taste much like orange juice, more like an orange cordial: a bit too sweet and lacking any real orange kick.
The wedges, however, were very good.
We then asked for the dessert menu and made our choices. Then we waited for the waitress to return.
And waited.
And then we waited some more.
Of course, she was busy. Well, all three of them were. They were all serving one guy. Must have been a big order. But seriously girlies, if you want to flirt with the guy do it on your own time, not when you have other customers waiting.
Eventually (nearly 15 minutes after asking for the menus in what was now a very nearly empty restaurant) a waitress wandered over and asked “would you like to order dessert?”
Well that was why I asked for a dessert menu.
After telling us the cheesecake of the day (passionfruit, that got my attention) she took our orders and wandered off behind the bar.
My dining companion was getting concerned: she hadn’t taken our order to the kitchen.
But eventually she did, only to return to inform us that oops, the cheesecake of the day was no longer passionfruit (I guess Dee Street must be in a different time zone to the rest of Invercargill).
I’d consider going back to give the place one more chance simply because the food was so good. But if the service was of the same standard we had on Friday, I’d be giving up on the place.
And dammit, get some decent orange juice!
I changed my order and when the food arrived we were more than happy with it. However, while the food was good the service was slack, rough, uncaring and a lot of other things it shouldn’t have been.