By all means, patronize this place if you're not a fan of customer service.
According to their menu, they serve breakfast till 3pm. In the immortal words of Pubiic Enemy, don't believe the hype. First, when I came up to the counter -- at 2:30 pm -- when I started to order my breakfast sandwich, the woman behind the counter started to interrupt me, and I said, "you're still serving breakfast, right?" Then she takes a loooooong look at the clock on the other side of the room and (insert Cher-from-Clueless-esque snotty sarcastic valley girl intonation here:) "Yeah, for twenty-five minutes."
Well, clearly, I missed the lesson in school where they taught us that "we serve breakfast until 3pm" means, "we *might* take your order at 2:30, if you're lucky". Excuse me for that.
So then I proceeded to order my croissant sandwich, which was met with a pointed look at the empty case in front of me and "we're out of croissants". As if I was supposed to know that that's where the croissants live, and how stupid was I to ask for one when obviously the case was empty. And then before I could draw breath to come up with another order, she jumped in with "and we're out of bagels too!" (ie, don't even think you can order a bagel sandwich instead.)
So I stepped out of line to consider my options, when another family came in and the mother tried to order breakfast food, and of course got a snotty answer about breakfast only being available for 15 more minutes.
I was so turned off by how I was treated, and how the next person was treated, I walked out. So many things wrong here:
1. It is generally not considered good customer service to be shitty to your customers.
2. If you advertise that you serve breakfast till 3pm, you should reserve the attitude if someone comes in before, say 2:55 and tries to order it.
3. If someone *does* come in at 2:55 or 2:45 or whatever, and you're worried about that 3pm deadline -- and really, what happens at 3pm? Does your kitchen staff spontaneously combust if waffles are ordered at 2:59? Or 3:05 for that matter? But if you're really troubled by the timing, you can actually say, in a friendly, apologetic tone, "I'm sorry, we can only serve breakfast item until 3pm, so I hate to rush you, but if you could get your order in quickly, we'd really appreciate it." You can copy that down, take it home and practice it, if it helps.
4. If you do serve breakfast till 3pm, perhaps it would help to keep an adequate stock of, you know, popular breakfast items like, say, croissants and bagels. Dare I say it, some people might even be tempted to eat these things at non-breakfast hours. Shocking, I know. But just think how cutting edge you would be.
and
5. Clearly, this isn't a question of just me being unreasonable. The very next patrons to come in were about to order 5 breakfasts, so obviously, I'm not the only one who sees "Breakfast served till 3pm" and thinks, hey, I think I'll go in and order some breakfast food!
In any case, I discovered there is a very nice cafe called Old City Coffee right around the corner. They weren't serving breakfast, but I enjoyed a lovely, attitude-free coffee and cake there. See, this isn't really about breakfast. It's about the utter lack of customer service I encountered at Cafe Ole. This was my first time really spending any time in Old City, and I wasn't about to spend any money there. read more