In praise of bad service

Look, we all know how these things work. You’ve put a restaurant or hotel guide together and need to make a bit of a splash, so there’s no point just publishing the thing and making some meek comment about how you had a perfectly nice time all in all and that it’ll be fun to do it again next year. It’s best to have a strong line to go with it. A gripe, really. That there are no decent restaurants west of the Shannon, that sort of thing.

The fewer people you annoy, though, the better. And the more people you ultimately reward, the better again. It helps spread the award plaques around, among other things.

If the guide is trustworthy it can be good for the businesses and handy for the public – and make a good headline or five. Everyone wins. Let’s do it all again next year.

The popular Bridgestone guides have long shown a flair for this, so that previous years have included launch-day quotes about the problems of replicating the céad mile fáilte when using foreign staff (2009), restaurants lacking ambition (2008), high prices (2007) or Killarney being best seen in a rear-view mirror (2000).

In 2011, during the teeth of the recession, John McKenna, the best known of the Bridgestone editors, picked up the mood a bit – but only a bit – by saying that the downturn had weeded out a lot of the bad establishments. “It is bewildering but ultimately heartening. People are spending their money smartly after years of senseless splurging during the boom.”

Georgina Campbell (of the eponymous guides) did not appear to be in agreement when in 2012 she worried that a lot of good places would go down with the economy. Then, in 2013, she complained about peeling decor and poor service.

This week she was back to launch the latest edition of her long-standing, and very useful, guide to Irish hospitality and with it brought a line about “amazingly bad service”. “We’ve encountered some quite shocking experiences around the country,” she explained.

This set the mind racing. Shocking service? Did a chef pick the fly from their soup with his fingers? Did a waiter emerge from the toilet while wiping his hands on his trousers and holding their bread between his teeth? Did a hotel manager mistake them for that so-and-so who gave them one-star on TripAdvisor?

None of that. It turned out that a four-star hotel had seated them for dinner at a dirty table. And repeated the mistake at breakfast the next morning, although not necessarily at a table of their own crumbs from the night before. So, you know, annoying, but hardly shocking enough to cause one to drop one’s monocle in the Bellini.

Campbell’s point was that training was key – which, extraordinarily, coincided with the fact that she’s now involved in hospitality-training programmes of her own.

Still, you wouldn’t fancy encountering what her reviewers experienced. And it seems only right to at least point out some general deficiency in standards, although even Campbell says these are only isolated incidents, as if there are pockets of crumb-ridden resistance yet to be crushed.

But perhaps it was the hint of cynicism in the publicity drive that had me feeling a little resistant to the suggestion that we should eradicate bad service once and for all, for the sake of the country’s reputation.

Because some of the most memorable meals and stays I’ve had have featured bad service. I remember the meal in Paris during which the waitress threw cutlery at us as if we were pinned to a revolving board at the circus. I remember an Edinburgh B&B in which we found the grandfather asleep in a bed in the kitchen.

There was a recent Dublin meal in which the waiter’s realisation of how bad he was triggered repeated, minute- by-minute apologies that only made the service worse.

You remember the good meals, but you never forget the bad ones either. All the ones in between are as quickly forgotten as eaten bread – unless you lost a tooth to the bread because it was so stale.

Bad service starts off as annoying, and is then enraging (and expensive), but eventually softens into a half-decent story and a laugh. Bad service is what makes for the most readable reviews. Without bad service there would be no real appreciation of great service.

But, most importantly, without bad service there would be nothing to talk about at hospitality-guide launches. And that would be the greatest tragedy of all.

shegarty@irishtimes.com @shanehegarty