Your food sucks!
Recently my colleagues and I went to this Hainanese Restaurant for lunch and found that the food there was rather sucky. We were complaining about it among ourselves and one thing led to another, and we had this hearty discussion on giving feedback when it comes to food.
Although I think this is not very much a Malaysian culture, more restaurants nowadays seek to provide better service for their customers. So at the end of a meal, they would ask the customer on how the food was. Malaysians being Malaysians, I think we tend not to want to offend anyone... so most of us would shyly say "Err..okay lo" although the food tasted like feet.
So back to the discussion I had with my colleagues about this, one of them actually said that once when he was asked this question, he bluntly answered "None of the dishes we ordered tasted nice" and the restaurant owner's face immediately turned black.
Some of us there did not agree with this colleague for being so bluntly honest. "Why would we want to offend people like that?", someone said.
I on the other hand, thought it's a right thing to do. I mean if you can't take negative comments about your food, then you shouldn't pretend and ask your customers for their feedback, right? If you are asking for feedback, then you should take them constructively and find out what's actually wrong with whatever that you served!
So I think as a consumer, we have every right to provide honest feedback when we were asked for it. Perhaps what we need to be careful about are the intentions of these feedbacks and how to "refine" the way we present them.
As I said, I think this is not a very Malaysian type of culture to begin with. Like it or not, people still can't take the fact that their food sucks!
