Are we serving?

Sitting in our quiet local pub, whiling away a sunny Sunday afternoon. It’s almost like a song by the Kinks. Life can’t get much better. Unless you factor in that it’s a Greene King pub, and therefore quite homely to a Suffolk boy like myself.

As a musician, you get to know pubs quite well. It’s very rare that a gig comes up on your doorstep, and unless you want curly hair from eating crusts and half-melted cheese sandwiches, pub-grub becomes a staple part of your life.

Every single person entering the pub asked the same thing though, ‘Are you still serving food?’

What has happened to us as consumers in this country, that we now ask apologetically if we can buy something. You see it in shops too: ‘I’m sorry, but do you stock… um… perhaps… some tea?’. We ask mechanics if they might possibly be able to fix our car. If you walk in to B&Q, and at this point I implore you not to, people say, “you don’t stock grout do you?”. We assume the negative and seem surprised if they can help us.

Strangely it doesn’t happen elsewhere. Mr and Mrs Mondeo don’t go to the Year 8 parents evening and say, “I don’t suppose you could teach little Billy something, I know he’s a little difficult” – no, they go there and accuse Mrs Smythe of underestimating their little prodigy’s skills. Patients don’t arrive at casualty saying, “Sorry to interrupt doctor, and I hate to impose, but could you remove this spear that’s annoyingly become lodged just below my left lung?” – no, they cry bad management and threaten to call Lawyers Direct (TM) the moment a nurse sneezes.

I was going to put it down to our expectation of poor service, but do you know what? It’s a lot better than it used to be. And our local little pub is fantastic – peas served in gravy boats, and a semi-circular gammon steak served on a square plate by a waitress with a friendly smile.

I guess that only leaves the reservedness of the English to blame. I can’t imagine Joe Yank walzting into a bar asking politely if they could rustle-up a cheese sandwich – he’d have specified how rare he wanted his steak and which national fag he wanted his fries to depict on his plate before Jonny English had caught the eye of the barman.

I suspect the same would be true of our European neighbours. We just don’t have that ‘the customer is always right’ consumer-orientated 24/7 society going on here. Sure, there are times I wish I could get my tall-skinny-fairtrade-decaf-vanilla-latte at 2am, but would I want a world where men walk into pubs and demand food without asking if the chef was in? I think not.