Would give 0 star if I could for this extremely unpleasant encounter with a very rude cashier, and concerns about lack of restaurant integrity.
Context: Ordered Nasi lemak on Grab. Food was collected by husband. During collection, husband was curtly directed to pick up food outside the restaurant, and no mention was made about any changes to the food item.
The Nasi Lemak came with plain white rice. I don’t imagine it’s unreasonable to expect my 椰浆饭 to be, well, exactly that. I live a short distance from the restaurant so decided to walk back to check, thinking it might have been an inadvertent mistake by the restaurant.
When I stated my concern that my Nasi Lemak came with white rice, the servers and cashier exchanged a future glance with one another, and the cashier immediately asked one of the elderly servers to pass me the menu, and asked me what I wanted. I was taken aback. It took a few prompts for the cashier to directly address my concern, and she conceded that there was no more Nasi Lemak. They had closed the order on FoodPanda but not Grab, she explained. I asked if there was any attempt to reach out to check if we are proceeding with our order (as restaurants typically do when items run out during preparation), to which she initially said she could not reach us. When I later clarified what she meant, it turned out the restaurant did not attempt to reach out, as that would entail “going through Grab”, implying that it was cumbersome. I was slightly perplexed as there’s a Chat with Merchant function on Grab, but perhaps the interface looked different for business owners. So I asked how the restaurant typically resolved incidents like that when an order was made and paid for, and the restaurant was not able to meet it. In effect, she said that if the order is “big enough” (her words) they would wait till the delivery man has arrived before they clarified with the customers who ordered. In other words, small orders did not warrant common courtesy.
If she had just apologised and explained the restaurant had ran out of Nasi Lemak (completely understandable) and been honest that they did not reach out, I would have accepted it as sheer bad luck. Instead she adopted a condescending attitude. She first asked that I picked a different dish, then later misunderstood when I said to just return me the food and not waste it (as I did not want any other item) - she thought I wanted a refund, and rummaged through the cash box repeatedly asking how much the food cost.
The restaurant had clearly knowingly swapped a key ingredient in the dish, and there was no attempt to explain either via Grab or to the customer upon collection. I’m not sure what the restaurant expected in the absence of communication - that I would just know that the white rice was a replacement as Nasi Lemak had run out, that I would assume that it’s a mistake and quietly finish the food without fuss, or that I would not notice the difference.
All I sought was an honest explanation, but the condescending attitude displayed by the cashier was both unwarranted and appalling.
Not a 1-star review because the other elderly servers had always been lovely when we dined in. We had eaten at the restaurant (both the Sembawang and Taiseng branches) multiple times over the past years and while food quality was not always consistent, it was overall a pleasant encounter.