My wife and I decided to go here for a late lunch on last Wednesday afternoon after seeking out the location of Colin Butchery and Bakery, as it was close by the Colin establishments and had all day Happy Hour posted for Wednesday. We had...dined here for dinner on a previous trip to PV and enjoyed ourselves.
We went in and noticed that the entire left-hand side of the restaurant was taken up by a group playing Scrabble, they looked like they were enjoying themselves, so not wanting to intrude, we opted to sit at the bar.
When we pulled up to the bar the bartender was thoroughly washing his hands and forearms, we thought that the thoroughness that he applied to the washing up was impressive, so off to a good start.
We ordered two Corona’s to start, he offered us menus which we gladly accepted - we started to look over the menu over two very cold bottles of Corona.
We settled on ordering 2 beef sliders (1 each is 75p, 2 are 120p). We ordered one cheese and bacon slider and one blue cheese dressing and bacon slider and a side order of fries at 45p. About 15 - 20 minutes, (not very long), our food arrived, brought to us by the same bartender, the sliders along with a small dish of ketchup were nicely presented on a wooded board and the fries arrived in a basket. We immediately tied into the fires, which were clearly frozen fries but were very good – served piping hot and seasoned perfectly – we actually asked for salt and did not end up using it.
The sliders were nicely seasoned as well, not too salty and with a nice amount of garlic in the patties, a bit on the heavy side but by no means offensive, just right !
They were both very tasty! We shared each slider by cutting it in half and we decided that we preferred the bacon and cheese slider over the blue cheese dressing slider, just because the blue cheese dressing ran out along the outside of the entire slider making it a bit messy to eat (albeit still a very tasty dish). Our bartender / server checked on us a couple of times to see how we were enjoying our meal and if we needed anything – very good attentive service, while not being overly intrusive.
We switched over from beer to two glasses of wine during the meal and enjoyed a very nice Sauvignon Blanc that was the “Vino de Casa” – our “go to” white wine is usually Pinot Grigio, but we decided to try the Sauvignon Blanc House Wine as it was quite reasonably priced and were pleasantly surprised at how much we enjoyed it. As we ordered our wine, a new crew came on to take over the bar, a young man and young lady came on in addition to our bartender / server that had been manning the bar by himself and they started obvious preparations for that evening’s dinner serving.
The two young men went about their duties of stocking up cases of beer, hauling bags of ice – duties that were had heavy lifting involved and the young lady took over the bar.
We leisurely finished our wine and asked her for the bill, she said sure and proceeded to take a tablet out and punch in numbers, then printed out a hard copy receipt – the total bill for 2 Coronas @35p each (70p), 2 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc @65p each (130p) two beef sliders for 120p and a basket of fries @45p was 365p – a very reasonably priced late afternoon lunch that was most enjoyable, both in terms of quality of food and good service.
Then things took a turn to the negative, the young lady started to process the final tab on her tablet and asked, “would you like to leave a tip guys?”, to which I replied “Yes, please add 20%”.
She proceeded to punch in numbers and then passed me a small handheld card reader style of credit card terminal – it was very small and fit in the palm of my hand and was not capable of printing anything out hard copy like a normal Interac processing terminal. I put in my Visa and punched in my PIN and gave it back to her. She then asked me if I would like my receipt, to which I replied “Yes’ – she then said “Oh – it is only available by email is that OK? I will need your email address” I wasn’t thrilled / comfortable about handing out my email address, so I said , “No thanks – what is the total amount of the bill please?” She quickly responded – 498 pesos. Alarm bells immediately went off for me as I had quickly totalled in my head that a 20% tip would come in around 75p on a 365p total bill (it was actually 73p when I pulled out my phone to use the calculator.
So, using the calculator quickly at the bar, I determined that she had added an additional 60p to her tip - 498 – 365 = 133p tip in total that she added instead of 73p tip of 20% that I had authorized. This translated to a 36% tip, almost double what I had authorized…
Now by this time the transaction had already been approved, I considered saying something, but thought “Lesson Learned Here” in future give the tip in cash or don’t be embarrassed to bring out your phone to use the calculator to work out a specific amount and tell the server the specific tip amount to add and I decided to post a warning to other travellers about our experience on TripAdvisor.
Note that we have been coming to PV every year since 2009, and this has never happened to us before, nor do we consider ourselves naïve newbie tourists. Perhaps, (hopefully), just a chance encounter with a rogue bad apple employee…
Suffice to say that it was a very disappointing way to end an otherwise positive experience, I don’t think that we will be returning to Qulture because of the unscrupulous action taken by the female bartender – it just left us with a bad feeling of being fleeced as tourists…
Live and Learn, the Customer always has the right to choose not to return.
Hopefully this post will contain useful information for other travellers….More