Poorly
It’s been probably the longest gap between blog posts since I started doing this. Partly due to just struggling to find time but also having been wiped out by some sort of a virus. One that I’m still feeling the after effects of a good week after it first kicked in. Interestingly, I’m still getting a trickling of traffic on the website despite the lack of new content although the clear drivers of any of my website numbers are the days when I share new blog posts on Facebook or direct email to subscribers (hello!).
The virus was fairly miserable. Pretty much completely bed-bound for the first two days of last week and then too exhausted to do much else for the two days that followed. I went to put the bins out with Piglet on Thursday morning (as usual – it’s one of his highlights of the week) but had to lie down for about 15 minutes to recover! Its silly really, that’s pretty much the only illness I ever get (fever, exhaustion, a few days of overwhelming fatigue) but I get it just slightly more often than I wonder if I should. It either means my body is very good at anticipating an immune system workout when I’m about to get ill and just presses the ‘off’ switch until it’s over – or there’s some sort of underlying ‘thing’ that keeps coming back. I honestly don’t know which.
What with being busy and illness, there hasn’t been a huge amount of content to keep you updated with. We’ve had a handful of meals out but all in places that I’ve written detailed blog posts about previously; so there’s not much point going back over them in more detail. Although there are a few things to bring you up to speed on. Just quickly, we did have a good lunch in Pizza Express including a decent first try of a gluten-free (and dairy-free) pizza. The reasons for why are an entire blog post in itself so I’ll leave this for another day. But the experience backs up the praise I’d given in this previous post.
We also had a day recently where (for completely different reasons) we ended up having lunch out in Reading and dinner out in Gerrard’s Cross. The stark contrast in experiences only serving to remind that ‘good allergen customer service’ is not a one-suits-all solution:
Piglet has shot up in height recently and we’re finding increasingly that his clothes (sometimes even fairly new) don’t fit him very well. So we heading into Reading for some retail therapy with the Grandparents last weekend. Retail therapy is perhaps not the best choice of words considering that my wife doesn’t like shopping and any shopping with a 2 (very nearly 3) year old loses its appeal pretty quickly.
As planned, we broke the shopping trip up with a restaurant lunch and had the choice between many of the standard food chains you might expect to find. In the end we chose Zizzi’s, given that we’d recently eaten in a couple of the other chains that we knew were good for allergies and as mentioned here, they’re very good for allergy information. They have a dedicated allergen menu but on top of that there’s a full dairy-free or gluten-free menu to choose from with all your options in one place. In our case with soya, we can just check anything from the dairy-free menu against the main allergen menu. As good as anything out there in terms of helping you choose.
Although, as good as the allergen info is we once again were left with a slightly disappointing (and strange) customer experience. As in the previous blog, there was no compromise in terms of eating things we shouldn’t and it was a busy Saturday lunchtime when they looked like they were running at full capacity. But still, there were a list of things that could easily be improved upon: Firstly, the food took ages. I didn’t time it but a one course meal for 5 people (having chosen what they wanted fairly quickly) took over 1.5 hours from beginning to end. We ordered for Piglet from the kids menu and were able to choose a dairy-free garlic bread starter and small dairy-free ham pizza as a main. Sounds great but the way they made the garlic bread dairy-free was to remove the garlic butter and the pizza came without any ham. So basically he ended up with bread followed by ‘cheezy’ bread. All of the food groups there!
We did ask about the ham and they apologised for the error and took the pizza away. Sadly this left a very sad Piglet as everyone else had their food and he ended up just eating the pizza that mummy and daddy had bought to share (a shared pizza tends not to mean a lot of spare pizza). They did eventually bring back Piglet’s pizza with what appeared to be three pieces of warmed packaged sliced sandwich ham. Uninspiring at best; rank at worst! By their accounts, my in-laws’ lunch wasn’t brilliant either. The final oddity was the manager coming over to ask if it was right that we were unhappy with the kids pizza. Given this was before the pizza had arrived, I was a bit perplexed but it turned out that he’d come to the wrong table and it was the table next to us complaining that their kids pizza had virtually no toppings. It all goes to show that having great allergen documentation is brilliant but it’s nothing without good customer service to go with it.
At the other end of the spectrum (and the day); we went back to one of our favourite restaurants from yesteryear. A Thai restaurant in Gerrards Cross that we first went to when were looking for places to live as we relocated from Bath some 7 years ago. We go just about often enough to be recognised but not so often than we’re on a first-name-basis. There’s no allergen menu, quite a lot of the menu has soya-sauce in the stir-fry dishes but the food we can eat is delicious.
We’d had a couple of communication issues before and had to re-choose starters etc… but this time when placing our order the waitress was able to talk us through how they make a lot of the bases for the stir-fries and what they’d need to look out for in doing substitutes and helping us order. As it happened we’d already decided we wanted two of the curries which we knew were likely to be fine but it was so nice to be talked through the menu and given tips from a point of knowledge and care. Typically I would always choose a place like Zizzi over Thai Rack (great name, right?) because it should be easier to get a safe meal. But actually it’s the staff as much as the procedures/documentation that makes experience valuable.