Last night Lia and I went to La Vita E Bella and had a rather unfortunate experience with neglectful service.
We arrived around 8 PM and expected to get seated quickly since there were a number of open tables. It took almost ten minutes before someone even acknowledged us and during this time two other parties who arrived after us were welcomed and seated. I’m 6’3”, how do you miss me? After the wait to even be noticed it took another ten minutes of, “Just one minute,” before we were seated at one of the empty tables.
I was pretty exasperated at this point in time – I can’t ever recall it taking so long for someone to acknowledge me at a restaurant.
After about five minutes someone came buy to take our drink order and Lia picked out a nice $38 Barbera which was brought over in an uncharacteristically prompt manner. The good wine started to calm me down so I didn’t even really notice too much when five and then ten minutes went by without anyone coming to take our food order.
Alas, the delays started to irritate me again as additional minutes ticked by. Finally I simply stuck the cork back on the bottle of wine, threw $40 down on the table, took our wine and went down the street to have a delicious dinner at Marjorie. And they only even charged us half corkage.
The funny thing was how good it made me feel to walk out. I seldom feel like a victim of circumstance, but realized that was exactly what I was doing at La Vita E Bella. I was allowing them to aggravate me with poor service. I doubt there was any malice in their actions, most likely some waiter/waitress simply called in sick at the last minute. Because I had mentally committed to eating dinner there, I sat and took it for over 40 minutes.
Sitting there and “taking it” is not my modus operandi and so I wonder how much the irritation was caused by the poor service versus simply being outside my comfort zone. I wonder if there are other places in my life where the same is true.
