Some people may have felt my lashing of Danger Doyle's last week was a little intemperate, given that it has only been open a month or so, and I've only been there twice.
However, you sometimes don't need very much experience of a place to be completely put off. Sometimes, indeed, once is enough.
Now, Glenn Phelan, the general manager of the place, is a decent enough bloke, and is accounted by some to be a great success in launching (but perhaps not salvaging?) large expat bars - having been the main man behind the setting up of Brown's, the new Frank's Place, and (the execrable) Paddy O'Shea's. However, he parted company from each of those ventures within a fairly short space of time; and, after an initial wave of curiosity/popularity, I think all of them experienced some problems (well, Brown's tanked completely; Paddy's went through a very lean spell, I gather; and Frank's probably survives mainly on the core customer base of long-time expats who've been using it as their headquarters ever since it first started in its original Gongti location 20 years ago). Some would say that they only hit difficulties after he'd gone, because he'd gone, and it may be so; but I'm inclined to think that their potential implosion was apparent from the outset. So, I think the guy's 'wunderkind' reputation might be a bit exaggerated; indeed, the evidence of Doyle's would seem to suggest that, if he is not quite a one-trick pony, he does have a rather limited and obvious repertoire of ideas (daily special events, long beer list, gimmicky promotions). At least his previous efforts had certain advantages of location, a strong target demographic, and bringing something a little 'new' to the scene. Doyle's is a tired retread of standard expat bar models - part Paddy O'Shea's, part Nashville, part The Den.
That might have sounded unduly bitter. I have nothing against Glenn, and wish him all the best in his career. I'm sure he'll be involved in many other bars around Beijing over the next few years - some of them very successful, and some of them less so.
It's just that Doyle's really, really deserves to be one of the great crash-and-burn failures. And I'm afraid that is at least partly Glenn's fault (although, as I said before, the bloated space, dire location, and uncomfortable proximity to The Den are what really doom it) - although, who knows, he might be able to work some of his 'magic' to redeem it yet.
A few weeks ago I had one of my worst ever 'annals of bad service in China' experiences there. Really, really, really gobsmackingly bad. Now, Glenn, I gather, prides himself on developing good service standards among his staff, and maybe he just hasn't had the time to train people up as he'd like yet with Doyle's. (However, I found the service at Brown's and Paddy's quite staggeringly awful too, even after they'd been open for some months.)
Now, I make allowances. I don't get angry with the staff - it's the training and supervision that lets everything down. And the serving folks there were pleasant enough, and spoke modestly good English. But the attentiveness was ZERO. And the customer service/communications skills were ZERO.
It was a slow Sunday night, and I was sat at the bar. I think I've remarked on here before about how staff alertness tends to be even worse when things are slow - they get bored, they fall asleep at their stations, they chat to each other. When the joint's hopping, they're more adrenalised, and they have to pay more attention.
And almost all Chinese bars tend to favour the waitress-service model; it's regularly more difficult to get served at the bar than at a table.
However....... to be one of only a handful of people in the bar and still have no-one ask if you want another drink, ever, is pretty bad. To struggle to catch someone's attention to order another drink, even when they're only a yard or two away from you and doing absolutely nothing else is somewhere beyond bad.
And then, the coup de grace: they f**ed up my bill. HOW do you put an extraneous item on someone's bill when: a) they are one of only six customers in the place; b) they've been drinking the same thing all night; and c) the cocktail they've added has not been served to anyone else there either??
I had decided that I didn't like the place enough to want to stay there for the second of the evening's Premiership football games, so was in something of a rush to settle up and head off to Luga's Villa or The Den before the next kick-off. I struggled for some minutes to attract anyone's attention to ask for my bill. The bill then took several minutes to arrive (I tried my best to be patient: it was apparent that both of the bar staff were completely flummoxed by the touch-screen computer till). I pointed out politely that there was an error in the bill, and said what I was expecting to pay. Everybody ignored me. I mean, IGNORED. They wouldn't talk to me, they wouldn't look at me, they wouldn't attempt to apologise or explain what was going on. This was not just a language mis-match: they all spoke reasonable English, and I have enough Chinese to query a bill. No, it was just a customer service black hole: they weren't sure how to deal with the problem, so they just turned away without saying a word.
Again, I lay the blame at the door of the management. When the place is new, and maybe the staff are too, when they're perhaps not familiar with the new menu, new prices, the new stock-control technology - they need constant supervision by a senior manager or one of the owners (preferably a foreigner, or a - if such a thing exists [it does, but it's very rare] - a Chinese member of staff with heaps of experience and really good English). In fact, most Chinese service staff need constant supervision and support at all times, under all circumstances. There was NONE available on this night. The shift manager was a young Chinese guy: nice enough, good English, but desperately green around the gills. When he eventually showed up (after I'd been kept waiting several more minutes), I explained the problem to him..... and he promptly turned on his heel and left, without a word to me. I never knew if he was dealing with my problem, or with someone else's problem, or if he had simply left the building. The other staff were unable to explain to me what was going on.
After another 5 minutes, I left my money on the bar and stomped off.
I think, by this time, I would have been quite within my rights to have left without paying - but I'm a nice guy. (A lot of bars/restaurants expect their staff to make good any discrepancies in the till out of their wages. This is all well and good in developed countries, where the main concern behind such a measure is probably the danger of embezzlement by staff rather than dishonesty or dissatisfaction among the customers, and where the wages - or at least, the tips [China is a non-tipping culture] - are more substantial. Here, most people are working for peanuts, and someone walking on even a 100 kuai tab is going to sting!)
I hope that was an untypical experience, and that things are getting much better there now. But I fear it won't make any difference, since Danger Doyle's is probably doomed never to have a substantial number of customers and to fold before the end of the year.
I suspect I shall always remember it, though, as the scene of my Worst Ever Customer Service Experience In China.
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