Kitty's Corner

Copenhagen Catfiania.

I like having my dinner in a restaurant. It doesn't have to be anything fancy or French. In fact, Italian is my favourite, and as a close runner up, comes Hard Rock Café. Hard Rock Cafe is a chain of theme restaurants, their walls are covered with rock and roll memorabilia - guitars, records, posters and so on. And there is always music there. Loud music - which means you can both burp and fart without anybody noticing! Currently, there are 150 Hard Rock locations in 53 countries.



I do, obviously, own an "All Access Card", which means you don't have to wait in line for a table, you can just stroll right by the angry\impatient people in the queue and get seated almost instantly. I like that. Even though I paid for the card, I still enjoy that fact a lot. People wait in line for 45 minutes or more, on a Friday night - and when we just waltz up and get taken to a table pretty much straight away, it just works, you know?

I've had both great and not so great experiences there. Allow me to share a couple of stories with you.

I'll start with one of the not so successful stories. We went there and got seated right away as always. The waitress came and introduced herself, and left us some menus. We browsed through them, and decided what to order, and then we waited. And waited. And waited. After half an hour she breezed past our table with the words "I'll be right with you", after which she attended to several tables other than ours.

(Open sirloin sandwich. I can't recommend it - it tasted just as messy as it looks...)

She finally took our order and we got our drinks. After more than half an hour of waiting, she decided to show up with some food. Unfortunately she didn't bring it all, and said that the rest was going to be brought in shortly. After ten minutes of waiting I called one of her colleagues (she was out of sight) and demanded the rest of the food. He apologized and went to get the remaining order. By the time it arrived of course, the other food was already cold. This does not make for a happy Kitty.

(One of the Hard Rock Café burgers. Highly recommendable.)

We finished our meal, and waited for a long time to get to pay (and she fucking had the nerve to suggest a tip, which she obviously didn't get!). We took the receipt and left. It turned out that there was a series of numbers on the receipt that you could use to fill in a survey online. We decided to not let this very bad experience go unnoticed so we filled in the survey and told them exactly what we thought about what happened that evening.

(Desserts, also known as "bites". Peanut butter pie and Strawberry cheese cake. None of them recommendable!)

Imagine my surprise when I received an email from Operations Manager saying that she read our survey and she sincerely apologized to us and invited us back to "restore faith".

After a little mailing back and forth, to try and figure out whether she was really inviting us on a free meal, we decided to go there and check it out for ourselves. We asked at the counter, and yes, the Operations Manager had made sure that the evening was complimentary.

(Brownie. Definitely recommendable!)

We had a great evening with really good food and excellent service. So - faith restored, and Hard Rock Café is still one of my favourite places to go and have dinner.