How not to run a bar (2)

There's a new bar in Sanlitun that's made quite a splash over the last few months, attracted "a following" very quickly.

I was inclined to dislike it for that reason alone. I have whatever is the opposite of 'sheep instinct'; crowds repel me. Especially noisy, younger-than-me crowds.

The decor's anonymous (but at least not obtrusively jarring, as is so often the case), the service pretty piss-poor, the pool table utter shite. And once, long, long ago, it used to be a much nicer bar - so my nostalgic sentiments were working against it from the outset. And it's called Rickshaw, which is a pretty naff, cutesy cutesy Chinesey name.

However, it does benefit from a central location. They have remodelled the place quite cleverly to make the best of the limited space; and it has a nice (though small) open balcony at one end, and and an outdoor seating area (probably an illicit seizure from the adjacent parking lot - a little piece of 'adverse possession', as we lawyers would call it). The food was not too bad. And The Choirboy and various other of my younger friends were developing a bit of a soft spot for it, were starting to make it quite a regular after-work rendezvous point (at least for the up-till-8pm 'happy hour' - the regular prices are just a tad steep).

And I was willing to play along with them. The place did not completely suck. I've enjoyed a few quite decent evenings in there over the past couple of months.

But then..... a couple of weeks ago, I arrived parched and famished after a particularly gruelling day at work. And I could not get the waitress to take my order. I mean, I told her what I wanted, but she wouldn't go and get it for me. It turned out that she wanted me to pay for the food in advance, but she wasn't able to explain that in either Chinese or English. Now, as I've mentioned before recently on here, I try not to blame the staff in these circumstances. This was a new policy, just introduced; the staff should have been briefed on the reason for it, made to understand that careful explanations - and apologies - would often be required for customers who were confused by or resentful of the change.

And it is an utterly f***ing STUPID policy. The service in that place is poor. The food is sometimes not that good. It often takes a long time to come. In circumstances like that, you want to have the recourse of not paying, or not paying in full. It would take you half-an-hour of wrangling to get your money back if you'd already paid.

I don't know of any other bar or restaurant in Beijing that demands money up front. They all, without exception, work on a 'tab' system; and that seems not too problematical.

Switching to a money-up-front regime is just pointless and dumb. Doing that overnight, and not bothering to explain the fact to anyone is beyond-dumb.

Like the place I castigated in my last post, Rickshaw is run by an American. It's easy to think that this kind of ineptitude is characteristically Chinese, that foreigners somehow automatically ought to know better. But it ain't always so.

Rickshaw is now on the 'Hate List'. I'm never going back there again.

PS The thing that really got my back up about this incident was that it took about 10 minutes to work out what the problem was with the food order; during which time, I was absolutely gagging for a beer - but the gormless waitress wouldn't order that for me either. And all she had to do was turn around and speak to the barman who was standing a few feet away. So, eventually I had to walk up to the bar and order a drink for myself.

Ah yes, and then, after protracted discussions with the barman and another waitress who actually spoke a little bit of English, we thought we had collectively explained to the gormless waitress that I did not want to eat if I had to pay first, and was therefore withdrawing my attempt to order a burger. But 25 minutes later, when I had finished my beer and was leaving to go and get a burger in The Den, Ms Gormless started plaintively following me down the street insisting that my burger was now ready at Rickshaw. Yes, even though I had quite clearly withdrawn my order (even including an elaborate mime of taking the sheet from her order pad, tearing it up, and throwing it away). Even though I'd never really placed my order. Even though I hadn't paid, as I was now apparently required to do before ordering. And even though that is nearly twice as long as it should take the burger to appear. Sometimes the sheer inventiveness of the 'bad service experience' in China is just awe-inspiring.