Last week, Tin and I went to have lunch at Lime@T5. Set lunch prices range from HKD$38-$98 including soup, main course, and tea/coffee, and the top priced include dessert as well. There were only a couple of other tables with guests at around 1:00pm!
Promotions included a glass of fruit juice as well as a coupon for 5 set lunches per person at the same price within 2 weeks and you get one set lunch at the same price for free. Well, the prices were right for the food was relatively good, but ain’t 5-times-in-2-weeks good. I wanted to say services was good, but come to think of it, not. The services was not that good except for that one merrily waitress was very keen on serving everyone with a big smile all the time. Other than that, the waiter who starting with us kind of ignored us even though both Tin and I speaks fluent English and he doesn’t seem to speak a word of Chinese.
Water was served for free which is quite normal for restaurants in the Mongkok area. The only problem was they had the salt and pepper shakers mixed up, which is a major mistake to me especially when quite obviously they were trying to target foreigners which is close to non-existing in the area. I had it down in their guest book before we left.
Well, yesterday I went with Roy for lunch there. First of all, it was half full, so looks like the rounds of promo had worked.
However, problems surfaced immediately after we sat down. There were way too many customers for the waiters and waitresses. We waited about 5 minutes before I had to raise my voice a little to catch a busy waitress just to get our menus. Another waitress served us the food and had no clue as to which dish was who’s or that the drinks she was holding was our order. Half way through lunch, the hostess who was graping customers on the street level was now in the restaurant helping out diligently but without helping the customers vs service ratio much.
The cream of mushroom soup had been good last time was changed to chicken broth with pea and corn yesterday. This could be a daily change but one simply shouldn’t serve such a soup at all. Both Roy’s and my dishes were too salty. No more salt and pepper shaker all together on any table. And as you can see, bottled mineral water now on every table and perhaps no more free plain water. I didn’t ask for free water but to me the bottled water suggested that. $38 a set lunch and we were expected to pay what… $15 a bottle of water or however much they charge?! Why not just scrap the free glass of juice and serve plain water for free instead?
About the only thing that remains was that one single merrily waitress – still looking as happily as she was a week ago but just can’t serve them all no matter how hard she worked.
Promotions may or may not work but if one is caught unprepared before business picked up, the before promo would be all wasted and a whole lot of other promos wouldn’t do any good once the customers have been ill treated.
WhaUSay?!