Picture from Trip Advisor
It was only recently that I found out that the restaurant chain Beefeater is still a thing, which was almost as shocking as finding out that Nottingham has a Wimpy. There's also a Harvester in the city centre where Mandi and I took advantage of their breakfast 'all you can eat' deal, I won of course but the delightfully large breakfast was spoilt slightly by the fact that the waitress didn't open by asking if we'd ever been to a Harvester before, don't they show old 1980s adverts during induction? Mandi is one of those people who receives untold amounts of emails offering incentives to try things and take advantage of discounts so we have on a couple of occasions been to Beefeater. It has the advantage of only being a twenty minute tram journey from our house, and only a few footsteps from the tram stop at the other end. The obvious disadvantage is that we have to travel there by tram, something I rarely do these days, although buying a ticket is as close as I come to gambling.
We came here tonight for a meal to celebrate my dad's birthday and the standard hasn't dropped one bit. Most restaurant/pub establishments tend to find the most bored, disinterested people in the world to serve the public and it does have an adverse effect on your enjoyment of the evening. Here the staff are friendly, attentive and best of all they actually seem to enjoy what they do. It could be that they all wish we would die a horrible death on the way home, which is what I used to wish for most of the time in the last bar I worked in. The food was faultless too which helps of course. Best of all was the fact that the waiting staff are allowed to keep their tips rather than share it out among the whole staff, possibly the ones who do less work. Once you know that this system is in place you have a better incentive to drop some money for them in appreciation of their work.
Older people often talk about bringing back National Service to sort out the young, but I seriously think that everyone should do a year from their 18th birthday working in pubs. When I was a barman I dealt with so many arsehole customers that now when I go into a pub I have enough respect to wait my turn, not wave money (money wavers always wait the longest), and generally make things as difficult as possible for the biggest twats. If I had a pound for every customer who thought themselves above the bar-staff and talked to me like a piece of worthless...
Actually, I did. More so usually as the really drunk ones hardly checked their change.
===
Thank you in advance for donating using the PayPal button at the top of this page. It all goes towards creating podcasts, sketches, documentaries, films and more, all of which I will make available for free in return for your generosity.
