DannieG

Coming from a NYC background, I love to eat, after sometime loath the busy lifestyle I found a city that’s a good four hours bus ride apart and a world of difference - Boston, MA. Everything about the city is so great… all except the food, the lack of food selections. Compare to NYC, there is nothing grand about the food experience in Boston, actually there isn’t much of a food experience at all, a dinner for two on Newbury st. starts at $60, easily. If this were New York we would have dinned on much more exocitc menus, instead, ravioli with shrimp.

Saturday, Nov 1st. We planned to dine at G’vanni’s on the North End, for me the whole area just seems very touristy — always busy and always unpleasant. However, unless we wanted to travel miles and get a headache with parking, the North End is something we have to settle for. Our reservation to the restaurant - 6:30pm - we arrived a little before 6:30, were asked to wait, after a 30mins of neglect, in the cold, the host came out and told us we are splitting tables with another party of two, which all four of us wasn’t very happy about, but we did try to make it good, after a few exchanges of greeting with the other two strangers, it all seems to be going smooth, after all have settled, we went on talking about our own topics, so did they… the time when we got comfortable, that’s when everything went down south - ‘there are no extra menu left’ told by the server, we had to share a menu in this dark lit place, that’s fine, I’ll let that go. The party of two next to us, then ask the server - very nicely - about how they would pair wine with restaurant specialties, the server was either too busy or not knowledgeable, she brush off on the topic by saying ‘you know just your basic wine selection… ‘ which sounds to me, was very unprofessional. When it comes to our order, 2 out of 3 dishes weren’t available, ON A SATURDAY NIGHT! you would think restaurants would stock up on food. ‘the food are bought pre-made so you can’t add or subtract anything’ the server told me when I wanted to add something to my dish. THEN WHAT THE HECK AM I EATING IN A RESTAURANT, I can just buy a box of hungry man and be done with it.

So I told my date, I rather eat else where, I guess coming from New York with so much selections, I’m used to good food and service. AND I refuse to pay overrated price tag for such a poor service and food selection. We then decided to head out, down to the theater district, ended up in California Pizza Kitchen, I love their veggie pizza I had my ways with added goat cheese and added grilled shrimp, the service was good, we each had our own menu, the booth was to ourselves, the server were helpful to meet our needs. We quickly forgot about the unpleasant experience and tipped our server wonderfully. Had we eaten at G’Vanni’s we’d end up paying for overrated food and service we are unhappy about.

This goes to show you, the important thing isn’t only getting your customers to the door, but it’s more importantly to take care of them while they are inside. Because bad service is worst than any good food.