F.I.S.H by Fish & Co.

I took a short break 2 weeks’ ago from preparing for my exams and headed there to check the new mall out and found that the human traffic at the mall was horrendous. The mall’s management even hired marshalls to be stationed at the escalators to ensure that human traffic is well-controlled.

Dinner was at the new concept restaurant by Fish & Co, F.I.S.H. The menu items included lobsters, spring chicken, pasta dishes like calleloni, steaks and of course, fish items such as cod fish with teriyaki sauce and fish & chips. Taste-wise, I would not say that it was anything special or memorable. The calleloni ordered by my companions was too soft and the sauce accompanying the dish was a little bland. The spring chicken came in a rather small serving, so if you are expecting anything like the spring chickens you see at coffee shops, you will be disappointed. The freezes offered at the Fish & Co. restaurants are also available at F.I.S.H.

Even though it was well after 9pm when we entered the restaurant, the staff were still enthusiastic in their service, albeit showing some signs of fatigue. We had servers coming to us with orders that weren’t ours several times and saw their confused faces. Twice, we had main dishes coming to us even though we had finished with our mains, the empty/half-eaten dishes still on the table. Some of them huddled together with the dishes still on their hands, trying to figure out where the dishes should go to.A staff failed to inform us that we could top-up $1 to get free flow of the drinks we ordered.

All these confusion and service lapses it is due to the restaurant being 2-days old and hence there were still some SOPs that were not in place or that the staff members had not been adequately trained. What made up for the service lapses was when the supervisor came to us, asking us if there was anything that could be improved on. For a new restaurant, it is good and essential to seek for customers’ feedback on both food and service in order to attain at least an acceptable standard in both areas as well as to leave a good impression on the customers.Of course, I am not saying that other businesses do not require feedback – in fact, quite the contrary. However, if new restaurants seek and work on customers’ feedback, they could possibly find out customers’ preferences, which sets the path for them to being successful.

Swensen’s @ Tampines Mall

My dinner at Swensen’s sometime last week wasn’t something overly unpleasant. However, I thought that it would help alot to speed up their service.

It took  about 20- 25 minutes for our main courses to arrive and another 20 minutes for our ice-cream orders to arrive after our main courses have been cleared. When the desserts arrived, the Sticky Chewy Chocolate that I ordered came with about 20%-25% melted. I figured this happened if they were preparing ice-cream orders from other tables and preferred to serve all of the orders at one go. This makes sense especially if you play the Diner Dash game where you gain extra points for doing the same actions consecutively (e.g. serving dishes to different tables consecutively). However, I would really prefer my food (hot or cold) to be served at its best and melted ice-cream isn’t exactly one of my favourites. I have to mention that the restaurant was not even 50% filled at that time so the waiting time is not exactly ideal.

The other thought I had while having my meal was the staff’s use of a table right behind the order-taking counter, as a collection place for dishes. Staff collected the dishes from the tables, put them on that empty table set for two people, and then go on piling the dishes there.Only after a while, one staff would go to the table and start piling the used plates, sometimes collecting the leftovers on 1 or 2 plates before bringing them to the kitchen.

I found this rather unsightly for a restaurant and didn’t quite understand why the used plates could not be brought to the kitchen immediately instead of leaving them at a place where customers could see. This may work operationally where less time is spent walking to-and-fro the kitchen to clear the plates but I doubt it is any appetising for customers to see an unfinished plate of crayfish pasta with used tissues on the plate and perhaps some other food remains that is piled on top.  Especially if you are ordering crayfish pasta yourself.

I thought that the service overall was average,  staff weren’t rude but neither were they friendly. Also, there is definitely room for improvement on the waiting time.

Pastamania @ Tampines Mall

After a 5-hour mahjong session (that was disguised as a Chinese New Year gathering) last Sunday, a group of us headed to Tampines Mall for Pastamania. This was after a 20 minute discussion on where we could find decent food at 9pm and we thought that Pastamania would be a good choice since it usually stays open even after our late night movies at 12am.

At the order counter, we were served by this service staff whose nametag reads “Lam, Store manager”. With this nametag, I expected good service since there must be some reason why he is a store manager right? Oh boy, how wrong I was. When I made my order of an Al Funghi cream pasta, I was answered with an impatient question (it sounded close to a retort) “Choice of pasta?”. When I made a second order for my boyfriend and before I finished saying the last word of my order, the same impatient question came. By then, I was miffed at that rude tone and poor service. I believe it would be basic courtesy to wait for one to finish ordering before asking the next question. Besides, what if he did not understand my order correctly and gave me something else?

Pastamania has grown tremendously over the last few years and has now 20 stores in Singapore.  I’m not sure if they operate by a franchise model but regardless what it is, rapid business expansion often comes with a greater responsibility to keep product and service quality in check. I hope that other Pastamania stores would deliver better service than that at Tampines Mall.