It’s not supposed to take an hour for eggs.

Hear that sound?  That’s the sound of the vacuum that occupied so.cial (at le magasin) restaurant in Vancouver’s Gastown district this past weekend at brunch.

I’m not talking about the kind of vacuum your parents used to rip out before guests come over to tidy up the living room. 

I’m talking about the customer service vacuum that completely sucks all traces of it out of the room.

As we were bombarded with biscuits and jam to tide us over (four helpings of them, to put a time stamp on it for you), the six of us were wondering what the deuce was going on with the staff at so.cial. 

 I’m glad we have such cool friends…took the edge off.

I mean, sure, if a restaurant is slammed and the staffing is a little tight,  I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But c’mon, 50% capacity, maybe, with enough people to run the joint comfortably during weekend brunch with waiting times that would rival your local walk-in clinic?  No excuses.

Here’s some take-aways that the six of us agreed on:

• so.cial’s service was bleak (check the photo of the ‘jammy knife’ that was conveniently placed back on my placemat after my fourth biscuit in anticipation of the main course…which took another 10 minutes or so to hit the table)
• Food was ‘warm’ (not hot), warm
• It took an hour to get our food
• Biscuits aren’t cool for brunch…I don’t care how many of them you throw at us
• Soiled flatware shouldn’t be put on the table for the main course…my favourite

What’s confusing to me is that our servers (we weren’t really sure who was serving us…I don’t think they were either) looked like they knew we weren’t happy.  Kind of hard to miss six hungry people scarfing down biscuits with ravenous eyes and dirty flatware.

My advice, take notes from the guys a few doors down…they get it.

Talk about a swing and a miss, so.cial…

darren