Brunch by Central Park

This morning we took some friends over to Sarabeth's Central Park South location. We had been there previously, but earlier in the morning when it was not at all crowded. This morning we had to wait for 20 minutes or so before being seated.

Service definitely suffered from the increased load. From the beginning, our waiter was standoffish at best. He appeared to use the minimum required number of syllables when communicating with us, and once he had taken our brunch order he disappeared, not returning until after specifically being summoned some time after the servers brought our order.

This brings me to the Bizarre Restaurant Incident^™ of the day. One of our guests had ordered a pumpkin muffin with her breakfast, but received instead an English muffin. The server did not linger when delivering the food, and was thus long gone by the time the problem was discovered. We then launched an effort to track down our waiter, which took ten minutes or so. In the intervening time, our guest started eating the top third of the pre-sliced English muffin, since it wasn't clear whether she would ever get a replacement and the level of service to that point had already led us to believe that we might not ever have a chance to exchange it.

When I was finally able to flag down the waiter, he tersely acknowledged the problem and left, only to return a few minutes later with a small side plate, onto which he then asked our guest to deposit the uneaten portion of the muffin. Although puzzled, she did as he asked, after which he whisked the two-thirds muffin away and after a couple minutes more at last returned with the correct pumpkin muffin. The whole thing probably took twenty minutes, from the initial delivery to final correction.

Now, I don't know how they run things over at Sarabeth's. I'm sure they have some sharp people in charge. Many different possibilities come to mind. Perhaps trust in the staff is low enough that a waiter is only authorized a replacement muffin after supplying the uneaten one? Or perhaps this ritual is meant as a preemptive measure so that patrons are on notice that in general complaints resulting in exchange of food items will be highly scrutinized? One can only speculate, but I would think at the very least that this was not the most efficient way to handle the situation, and certainly it left a negative impression in on the brunch experience overall.