Aug 09, 2007 12:29 PM
5643 Views
You book a table for 10 at 8PM. You arrive at 8PM sharp. Your rest of the guests come in by 8:30PM. In the meantime, you have started having soups and starters. While you're sipping on your soup, the captain comes to check the status of the rest of the guests. You inform him that they're in traffic and would be here any minute. Then follows another steward, questioning the same. Then comes a manager and checks with you if you'd be able to leave the table by 9PM?
Your guests arrive at 8:30PM and you share that since this place is too much in demand, they better skip the starting courses and move directly to the main course. They're apologetic that they were held up due to a long queue in the parking lot of the mall.
Then begins the ordeal. Right from the captain to the steward to the waiter, all give you a cold shoulder response.
NOW, I've been a regular to Sahib Sindh Sultan from the time it opened in The Forum. But the last two visits have had me changing my opinion about the place. The restaurant has forced me to rethink my priorities, whether its good food that I go there for OR bad service, so much so that a slight delay in arrival of guests can have their entire crew blaming you to the core and rest assured of bad service till the moment you leave that place.
On our way out, we ask for the complaint book to register a feedback and the crew blames it back on us that because you've kept the table for long, all this took place.
What the gentleman(not the owner but an employee without brains) didn't understand or bother to think was that if he'd been able to cycle the table once more, if we'd left the table on time, he'd at most have billed another INR 1000.00. If he'd been polite, I could have left him a TIP of the said amount and all would have been happy. But, on the contrary, he's lost not just me as a customer, but every single of that family that used to visit us and visited the restaurant.
I think my claim is substantiated by the fact that most of the reviews written here, for this restaurant, carry a low customer service rating.
The exclusivity of the place, that a new person lands in Bangalore and wants to know about this place called "Sahib Sindh Sultan" suggests to me that a brand is marketed well. But the treatment meted out by the restauranteer and his team gives me a feeling that the brand has risen beyond what the people behind the BJN Group can hold. Its not worth it.
I'd like to state here that this behaviour is totally unacceptable from a operator in the "hospitality" industry. The two hotel groups native to the city, the BJN Group as well as the Baljee group, have failed very badly on these counts and am simply surprised that folks are still patronizing them.
