Eating Humble Pie

This post is a little different than the rest and frankly I am not proud of it. But, sometimes we have to eat a little humble pie and admit we made a mistake. I want to relay an incident that happened on Saturday night.

A couple sat down at around 11:00pm for what was supposed to be a nice leisurely drink to finish the evening I presume. All was well until they placed their order for a beautiful bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet. Our server took the order and proceeded to arrange the bottle, which he could not find. He asked a manager to help while he set the glasses and readied the ice bucket. The manager still could not find the wine, almost 7 minutes had elapsed at this point. He engages another staff member to help. The guests are getting impatient and rightfully so. 10 minutes and still no wine. The manager decides to go to the table to apologize and ask if he can arrange a different bottle as the first one is M.I.A, but the guests decided they had enough and walked out. I don't blame them. We failed. We had a chance to wow them with a great bottle of wine, but we couldn't locate it. We had a chance to turn the situation around but we didn't get to table in time before they left. We had a chance to provide great service but we failed to produce what they ordered. We simply had too many chances.

I can truthfully say this is the first time in a very, very, very long time that this has happened. But, it will serve as a great lesson to us that when we make a mistake we need to deal with it promptly. In hindsight, we should have sent the manager over with Complimentary Champagne at the 7 minute mark, so that at least they knew we were trying to fix our mistake. Even someone going over and letting them know the situation would have been better then to just let them sit there waiting. A bunch of little decisions led to one very bad result. I don't know who the couple was but I want to apologize and invite them back to enjoy that bottle, yes we found it, finally. I know all of us here at WG have learned something from this situation and take it very personally.

These are the situations that can change the course of a restaurants fate. When people have bad experiences they talk about it, and their story influences others and so on and so forth. In any event, we have taken the necessary actions to alleviate the same mistake in the future and I am confident that this situation will never happen again. Till next time...