Doylestown Foodie Strikes Again – Slate Bleu – You’ve Got To Be Joking
With the economy crumbling before our eyes you’d think that business owners and entrepreneurs would catch the drift and bend over backwards to please clients so that they’d come back and evolve into regulars. Ok, don’t bend over backwards but at least have the general pride to offer half decent service that is commensurate with your fee structure. If you’re a high-end retailer or restaurant, it’s ok, it’s expected, be pretentious, at the end of the day you’re the goofball waiting tables while the customers coming in with MBA’s and PhD’s are spending $200 per meal laugh at you behind your back (you probably never knew that but it’s true) you can put on the fake facade of security by treating your guests as though they are one step beneath you but at least give them enough leeway or good service so that they come back.
Tonight I was at a Doylestown restaurant called ‘Slate Blue’; a little French themed restaurant in the middle of Central Bucks County where people come to spend money. I walked into this establishment with a few friends on a Friday night at 7pm, prime time for the rest of the spots in town. We figured it was an off night as we were literally the only people in the eatery. Sitting down the blond bartender took our drink orders and handed us menus. The options read like a French, Italian and Mexican baked bean casserole hybrid experiment from the laboratory of a third grade play-chef. We laughed and then the waitress came to take our order. This is where the fun began. A French restaurant, ok, most of you are laughing as the French got a bad rap during the ‘freedom fries’ act by congressional halfwits but let’s keep an open mind.
The waitress comes over with ‘jail house’ tattoos plastering the bottom of her forearms (what is that part of the arm called again?) and she reads off the specials of the day. Her tapped put junior high education dwarfed her ability to pronounce some of those hard to enunciate French/Spanish/Italian words. We were all a little embarrassed for her so we tried to make light of an otherwise awkward situation when she got to me I asked for a steak, medium rare. She looked at me as if I were speaking some Anunnaki/Martian dialect of Latin so jokingly I repeated in French, “Je voudrais un milieu steak saignant s’il vous plait.” You would have thought that I took off my shirt and started pouring water over my head screaming ‘bloody Mary’.
I am assuming that I through off her pretentious M.O. and she didn’t know how to react. She just didn’t get it. She grabbed the menu and, oh, it’s a waste of time to try to explain. She walked away and she, the effeminate 20 something kid and blond bartender whispered about us behind our backs at the bar but loud enough so that we could hear what they were saying. Guys, I mean this was a moment in time that the word ‘tacky’ just can’t describe how backwards and sad it was.
At the end of this five minute episode I asked my friends to go out to the car. I asked for the check so that I could pay them for their efforts, though we never got our food and we didn’t eat a single morsel of their inventive French/Italian/Mexican cuisine.
The service was deplorable. The staff was rude. I paid for a meal we never got and left a nice tip for a waitress with a 7th grade education and enough arrogance for the entire town of Doylestown.
Slate Bleu, not exactly a place where those with a refined palette and service standard would dine. If you are a sadist with a need to be talked about behind your back, second grade service with a premium price tag, then ‘x’ marks the spot. You’ll love this place. You could get the same attitude, substandard service and deplorable service from a West Philly McDonald’s or Popeye’s Chicken.
Customer Service ‘Will’ come back if we push local establishments to respect their patrons Gross Food Joints, then visit Doylestown Foodie’s friends at Slate Bleu Waitress Training Video
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