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From: [an eater]
Date: Friday, May 1, 2009
To: eater complaints dept.
Subject: Brunch Frustrations at Macondo
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It's an amazingly cold (for April) and windy Saturday morning and my girlfriend and I stumble out of our apartment (which is incidentally directly above Rayuela) looking for brunch and a bloody mary to cure our hangover. We walk by Macondo and decide to give it a shot. We walk in and a few people are eating over by the kitchen. After waiting around for about 30 seconds, which seems like an eternity in an empty restaurant, someone who is eating by the bar grudgingly gets up and walks into the kitchen, speaks to a chef, and then walks over to us. We figure it out right away as she starts to walk towards us--they are having their staff meal and aren't open yet.
She curtly tells us, "Sorry, we're not open till 11," obviously regurgitating what the chef told her. "Oh, thanks anyway," we say with a smile and walk out. We shiver our way over to Allen and Delancey instead...we get there and we notice it's 11:05am. What the fuck?
Now it is no more than a 3 minute walk from Macondo to Allen and Delancey. To give them the benefit of the doubt, lets say that the clock at Macondo said 10:58am when the hostess told us, "Sorry, we're not open till 11." (We assume it was a hostess and not a manager because she was probably 19 years old.) I can't think of a worse way to handle that situation. How about saying to us, "we don't start brunch till 11, would you like to have a cup of coffee at the bar till we're ready?" or even "we're sorry, but we're running behind today, would you mind coming back in a few minutes and we'll be ready?" But to turn us away 2 minutes before 11am in the cold, knowing full well that we're going to go somewhere else is rude and terrible business.
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