A new pinnacle in 'Bad service in China'

It was rash of me to suggest that my unhappy experience in Danger Doyle's a month or two ago - being rudely ignored by every member of staff I tried to order a drink from or otherwise talk to over the course of about 2 hours - would forever hold on to the prize for Worst Ever Customer Service Experience In China.

Just a few weeks later, I witnessed something in Tun that just blew that out of the water. One of my companions that night (yes, it was the night of the Great Beijinger Quiz Fiasco) had attempted to order a vegetarian burger.

Eventually, his burger arrived. One incautious bite revealed that it was not a veggie burger at all, but a regular beef hamburger.

It was perhaps unfortunate that this discovery was made just as I was trying to flag down the waiter to order a (beef) burger for myself. Our not-terribly-bright and scarcely-functional-in-English waiter was having a very hard time understanding my order. Then he had a eureka moment. He picked up my friend's unwanted, rapidly cooling, already partly eaten burger and plonked it down in front of me! Did he perhaps think that I had ordered the thing in the first place, and that he had mistakenly delivered it to the wrong person? No. I rather think he just saw two problems - this guy wants a beef burger, this guy doesn't want a beef burger - and found a shortcut solution..... completely overlooking the hygiene and courtesy issues involved in passing on food that somebody else has already started eating.

Oh, and it got worse. When I refused to take the burger, he returned it to its original recipient - the grossed out vegetarian - and tried to insist that he eat it. With increasing agitation he maintained that it was not a wrong order, and that once the guy had started to eat it, he had to finish eating it - and pay for it.

Here, I think, was the crux of the problem. The guy was probably afraid that any unwanted/unpaid for orders would be deducted from his wages. That kind of policy always results in the most desperately creative dishonesty - and occasionally in outright aggression - from staff: anything, anything; lying, theft, arguments, even fights; anything rather than be hit in your own pocket! Perhaps that is not the policy at Tun; but there is a danger that many naive and poorly educated young Chinese might assume that this is how things will work, unless the contrary is very carefully and persuasively explained to them.

Our by now hyper-manic waiter shifted his ground again very slightly. Now he was arguing that it was in fact a vegetarian burger after all - because it had one or two slices of mushroom on top. Did he really not understand the concept of the vegetarian burger? Or, in his anxiety to avoid a financial penalty that might have wiped out his evening's salary, was he deluding himself that the presence of a mushroom or two was proof that this was indeed the Tun veggie burger (which, I believe, substitutes portobello mushrooms for a beef pattie) - regardless of the much greater quantity of meat evident between the halves of the bun?

Anyway, he took to underlining his point by picking up the burger, removing the top of the bun, and waving the contentious mushrooms under our noses. Then to pointing to them, with a less than blamelessly clean finger. Then to picking them up.

He'd basically taken 10 or 15 minutes out of his other duties to try to argue the toss with us. And he was getting so arsey about it, things did seem likely to end in a fight. (Admittedly, one of my companions had lost patience with his rigmarole and had made some unnecessarily disparaging and inflammatory remarks to him in Chinese. But most of the guy's aberrant behaviour had preceded this unfortunate escalation.)

Yes, I think this is the winner - surely an unchallengeable claimant - of the unenviable Bad Service accolade.

But, as I so often say, I try to be as forgiving as possible of the individuals concerned. This young man was a bit of an unmannered hick - but perhaps he should never have been selected for this kind of employment. He certainly shouldn't have been unleashed on customers without considerable prior training. I suspect it might have been his first week, perhaps even his first day on the job - and he'd scarcely been prepared for it at all.

And if the staff training is so inadequate (as it almost invariably is in China, sadly), then close supervision and support by a more experienced (and, for a foreigner-targeted bar, fluent-in-English) member of staff becomes all the more essential. Since the American bar guru, Chad Lager, quit Tun a few months ago, it's unclear who, if anyone, may have succeeded him as senior manager there. On this night, it took us 20 or 30 minutes to find anyone with any kind of authority to sort this mess out and calm things down. And even then, I think all that happened was that the psycho waiter was dragged away to cool his heels out back for a while. Nobody offered to bring us the food we'd actually ordered. Nobody offered us any free drinks - or even an apology for the ugly scene.

Needless to say, I had swiftly given up any hope of being able to place a food order of my own. And, since I hadn't eaten much all day, mounting hunger pangs were an additional reason for me to flounce out of the venue well before the end of the event (as if the abysmal quizmastering were not enough!!).

A very bad night at Tun, indeed. The kind of night that puts you off ever giving a place another chance again.