One restaurant that I have mixed feelings about is Mrs. Wick's Pies, in Winchester, Indiana. While I have eaten Wick's Pies on many occasions (and am rarely disappointed), their restaurant has never really impressed me. I've eaten there twice (once alone, and once with my wife) and both times, while the food was good, the service was extremely lacking.
It's as if the waitresses were being paid to gossip amongst themselves, instead of serving the customers.
The really confusing part is that I read the reviews for this restaurant on both Facebook and Trip Advisor, and the vast majority have had a great experience, and out of all the ones that had a nasty experience, only one had a response from Mrs. Wick's Pies that offered any recompense, with another person commenting that maybe the waitress was new and/or having a bad day.
I'm sorry, I've worked at Pizza Hut, and even when my day sucked, I tried my best to make the customer's order the way it should have been. After all, it wasn't the customer's fault that my day sucked.
Being new is also not an excuse. There is such a thing as training.
The real problem, from my experience working at Pizza Hut, is poor personnel management and poor time management. Of these two, the personnel management is the most important.
A good floor or shift manager will keep his/her wait staff on the ball, and pay attention to their employees and what they are doing - or not doing. He or she will also keep an eye on the customers. If something is amiss, it should be easy to see, address and fix.
A good floor or shift manager will also ensure that their staff - both wait and cook - are properly trained and able to do their jobs. The best wait staff in the world cannot make up for a cook who cannot follow a customized order or cannot cook.
I've been to slow service restaurants before (hard to believe that they're still around in this age of fast food), but from what I've been told Mrs. Wick's Pies takes the cake in slow service.
Yes, I know that pizza establishments are slow service restaurants, too, but that's the nature of the business, which is why Pizza Hut is really pushing its buffet at certain times. After all, you cannot make a pizza two hours before it's needed. The dough, yes, but not the actual pizza. In fact, one of the major strengths of Pizza Hut is that they make their dough fresh daily.
The only restaurant that, in my opinion, compares to Mrs. Wick's Pies in slow service is Steak and Shake. The difference is that every time I've eaten at Steak and Shake, the food is excellent, excepting the supposedly fresh made chili (I have had Hormel's before, you know, and can recognize it very quickly.)
I don't know if they still claim to make their own chili, but I don't order it anymore. Their drive-thru window also cracks me up. That's another story, anyway.
The time management factor is important, no matter if your restaurant is a fast-food operation or a slow-food place. You have to get the orders done in their proper order, you have to serve customers in their proper order.
If a customer has to wait ten minutes for their drinks, you're doing it wrong. If you have carbonized burgers or shrimp or fries going out to your customers, you're doing it wrong. One review even stated that they sent their food back and the cooks simply refried it and tried to sent it back as fresh.
Guess what? Just because you or your cooks might've read George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London doesn't mean that you can get away with the same stunts he mentions happened in both Hotel X and Auberge de Jehan Cottard. In other words, you are doing it wrong.
A good manager, whether or not he/she is a martinet, will keep a restaurant humming along, and try to keep the problems to a bare minimum. The staff will still have time to chit-chat, but not at the expense of the customers.
A bad manager is usually one who is ruled by his/her staff, or one who ignores both staff and customers.
In the end, I'm inclined to believe that the biggest problem with Mrs. Wick's Pies is that the management ignores both the staff and the customers. With a strong wait/cook staff, that can overcome the bad management...for the most part. But there are hiccups, even then, and the biggest sign of management that is apathetic is that they ignore most of the complaints.
When I worked at Pizza Hut - mostly pre-Internet - we were warned that very few people actually verbally complained of a problem. Most of them simply let it simmer, and then they'd tell their friends and family. We were told that one unreported bad experience could potentially translate into ten lost customers.
Nowadays, you have such things as Facebook, Trip Advisor and Yelp, which is a tool that management in my time would've loved to have. Only one attempt to fix a problem on Facebook tells any potential customer of Mrs. Wick's Pies all you need to know about whether you should go to someplace.
For me, I'll avoid the restaurant and get a pie instead.
Though, to be honest, my wife makes a better sugar cream pie. It goes without saying that she also makes a better chocolate cream pie.
That's all for now.
Peace be unto you.
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