The very first thing:
When you enter the restaurant, there is a pay station, and it's there that you pay the standard amount per person for the buffet before you proceed to the area with the buffet stands and dining tables. The young woman manning this station was on what seemed to be a very animated, important call in Mandarin on her mobile phone. I put up three fingers, and things deteriorated from there. She asked me something in very poor, heavily-accented English, and then resumed her phone call. When I asked her to repeat what she asked me, she did, and then went back to her phone call. I apologised for not understanding her and asked her to repeat it a third time, and she became exasperated and visibly irritated with me and pointed to the extra charge for sodas on the menu. I then figured out that she was asking me if any of the three people in our party wanted soda with our meal. She had already turned her attention back to her phone call.
I put up one finger for one soda, she activated the card reader, we paid, and then she said something equally unintelligible, which I assume was some form of "Enjoy your meal", and looked daggers at me, said something loud to the person on the other end of call, and then looked daggers at me again.
So, she is very cross with me, well, angry, really, because her English skills are so awful that I cannot understand what she's saying. She's angry at me for her shortcomings. She's working as a cashier in an English -speaking country, her English should be passable, right? An analogy would be me working in Shanghai as a cashier in a restaurant and being unable to communicate with the customers in Mandarin.
I've ordered food in restaurants all over the world, and really, I don't mind the hiccups that happen between two people that do not share the same language; I expect it. No big deal, you muddle through it, and it gets done. I don't even mind that this business tasked an employee with dealing with customers in English when her English skills are so very basic. But, why the anger at me because her English is so rudimentary and so heavily accented that I can't understand it? I wasn't angry about the situation, why is the person at fault angry about it?
I don't get angry in France when a cashier doesn't understand my toddler-level French. I don't get irritated in Ecuador when the guy at the airport doesn't understand my miserable attempts at Spanish.
It's inexplicable to me that I should be the target of her ire. And if she's acting that way with me, you know I can't be the only one.
So, a bad start.
The food:
Everything seemed a bit old and tired, as if they had made it for lunch, it wasn't used up, they didn't replace it in order to save money, and it had been sitting in the chafing containers for hours, drying out. It was 3:30 PM when we were there.
I'm sure everything we had was much better when it was fresh.
So, very disappointing in terms of our meals. Putting the interaction with the cashier aside, I cannot recommend this restaurant. read more