Friday, May 9, 2008

The Ugly Malaysian in the restaurant/coffee shop

Yes, next on my Ugly Malaysian list...the happenings in a restaurant or coffee shop or mamak shop.
I am sure all of us have experienced one or more of these in their lifetime of eating out, which seems to be the in-thing to do, now that more work leaves us not much time to cook, to clean, and eating out seems the easy way out, one way of spending so called family quality time together, yes, we do spend a bit of our lives eating out and here is the list...

1. service is slow and waiting time is torturing.
2. cutlery arrives with food still stuck on them.
3. cups and glasses arrive with lipstick prints still there
4. unsmiling and unfriendly waiters
5. families with wailing children and their parents just let them...
6. constant coughing and sneezing from the table next to you without bothering to cover their
noses and mouths
7. mothers allowing their kids to run around the restaurant and bothering everybody else
without a care in the world
8. lovers arguing for all the world to hear
9. talking on their mobiles and letting the world in on their dirty little secrets
10. spitting and washing at the sink as if in their own house
11. throwing/leaving rubbish/tissue paper on the floor as they leave the tables
12. hogging tables even after their dinner has long finished and yakking the night away
eventhough others are waiting for a free table (another case of "territorial instinct".)
13. dishes are not what you ordered
14. food arrives with special unwanted ingredients (bugs)
15. unwanted listeners to your conversations
16. cutting queues whilest waiting for available seats
17. deplorabe toilet conditions
18. cutting chicken and fish on the dirty floors
19. kitchens in unhealthy conditions
20. cooks smoking and sweating while cooking

The list continues , be it the cook, the waiter or the customer, all have a role to play.
Recognise yourself? Recognise the situation?
Of course you say, avoid such restaurants, but easier said then done, we may not go back there again but people easily forget, so we are then back to confront a similar situation. When will we ever learn, courtesy on the road or courtesy wherever we go.
The ugly Malaysian is everywhere, till we meet again in the next list...

1 comment:

Thinking Allowed said...

Wah! Is this the standard feature of our Malaysian Coffee shop? What if one day when all these features are gone, will the tourists be missing something in their 'must see' list? I suppose we need to identify some coffee shops and label them as 'heritage' so as to make sure all the features you have listed are retained--for the sake of our tourism industry.