I do like to eat beside the Seaside

It started off well. A nice saunter along a beach, a spot of kite flying, then a spot of lunch. Well, in the immortal words of the poet Meatloaf, two out of three ain’t bad.

A pub lunch on a Sunday afternoon beside the seaside is a fantastic thing. Unless, that is, you forget momentarily that this is the British seaside and that means sharing your space with certain sections of society. Firstly, there’s the hardcore of women who, clearly inspired by a late-night viewing of This is Spinal Tap, had their home sunbed turned up to eleven and now have skin the colour and temperature of molten lava spewing forth from Vesuvius. At the other end of the Dulux spectrum are the brilliant whites. These come in two forms; flashes of white just below the trousers before the sock and sandal combo, or great swathes of chalk-white topless men whose numerous rolls of stomach could well have swallowed entire Poodles if not Labradors to their blubbery deaths. Seriously, I’m sure I heard barking from one of them.

Things didn’t bode much better inside the eatery. It should have been a clear indicator when we were seen but ignored by two waitresses beside a sign clearly reading, in letters 8 inches high, ‘Please wait Here to be Seated’ that service would be slow, but the menu was just too inviting. Clearly asking the waitress for a minute extra to decide was a mistake, as she disappeared for the next 20 as if she were a cameo in an episode of the X-Files. Where she went was a mystery, but clearly it wasn’t to serve others as one man who looked in his sixties but who could quite feasibly have been 50 when he began his dining experience, held a cash card hopefully whilst muttering about the possibility of having his bill.

Clearly we had the amnesiac waitress employed through pity. First she forgot to deliver chips instead of mash and at one point it took so long to clear the plates I began to wonder if she was expecting us to eat them too. Some, and I’m being distinctly British and polite as I want to write ‘Plenty of’, time later she took our desert and coffee order. Where she took it I have no idea as the coffee didn’t materialise, and getting the bill seemed a mountainous task akin to applying for an educational Visa to study joint honours dynamite skills and piloting at an Ivy League University. Our waitress was so forgetful that it’s quite possible she was never actually a waitress, but perhaps a businesswoman with a family in Stoke who’d forgotten where she was going on the morning commute and ended up waiting tables on the South West coast.

I mean, how hard can the restaurant business be? The basic premise of making money should be that the more people you get through their meals the more money you make. Do that politely and efficiently and they’ll come back which means more people through the door and, I refer the honourable gentlemen to the initial hypothesis, that means more profits.

There are a multitude of self-help books on the topic. They all begin with great lines like ‘everyone likes the idea of owning a restaurant’, which is odd as I can’t think of a single friend who’s spoken up about wanting one. The Upstart Guide to Owning and Running a Restaurant opens, whilst using the most liberal use of ‘relatively’ I have ever seen, with the premise, ‘The concept of a restaurant, as we know it, is a relatively recent one’. I’m sorry? Relative to the wheel, maybe. Fire, definitely. But what else?

The great work Is owning a restaurant right for you? says all restaurant owners “thrive on stress. If you can’t handle stress, then don’t even think about opening your own restaurant!”. Whilst I agree it’s no lazy Sunday reading The Guardian’s latest editorial on Mongolian cheese innovation, it’s not taking on The Red Baron in a dogfight over Munich or climbing Everest after heart surgery. An article entitled Five Myths of Owning a Restaurant manages to inadvertently slip a sixth under the door to Mr ill-informed by opening with ”I own a restaurant’: Nothing will conjure up looks of awe and envy faster than those four words’. I can’t help thinking ‘I patented the toaster’, or ‘I’m marrying Penelope Cruz’ would require some kind of official photo-finish with that one.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on the restaurant. It’s like that final round of Children’s TV favourite Knightmare researching the restaurant business with so many books about, teetering on a knife edge of soufflés success or flambes failure as you try to earn your bread and butter. So I’m not bitter about my dining experience, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the hardworking ladies and gentlemen of the restaurant business. As Roy S Alonzo writes in the Upstart Guide, ‘To those of you who may someday become restaurant owners, we [I] wish you a full plate of success and an overflowing cup of happiness as you pursue your goals’.

Bon appetite.