We all know how it feels: the restaurant is rammed, the staff are stressed and the food arrives late. Here’s how to avoid holiday misery
Looking forward to your holidays? Of course you are: lazy days by the beach with a good book. A glass of chilled rosé at day’s end, followed by a gentle saunter down to a local restaurant to request a table. Well, enjoy your dreams, my darlings, for this is where they become nightmares. On holiday we crave spontaneity; to be freed from the straitjacket of dreary workaday planning. But the dark truth is that on holiday spontaneity can murder a nice time out. Too often all the restaurants are full. Or if you do bag a table the place is rammed and dinner takes so long arriving you end up gnawing the over-varnished orange pine table out of hunger. And when the food does arrive, it’s a bunch of ingredients that haven’t so much been cooked as tortured.
This isn’t a new problem. Restaurants thrive through constant repetition; through doing the same thing, day after day, year-round. And yet for obvious reasons many holiday destination restaurants are dependent on seasonal trade. They only trade in the summer months. As a result, they simply aren’t match fit. Their staff can also be as seasonal as the punters. The dining room is run by nice young, bright-eyed people who are hugely versed in the works of, say, Sylvia Plath or Margaret Atwood, but hate some of the demeaning things that they have to do for money, while the understaffed kitchen is powered by an intoxicating brew of panic, resentment and Red Bull.
