Sunday would have been a lovely day to have brunch at Sweet Mother­’s Kit­chen, except pretty much every oth­er per­son in Wel­ling­ton had the same idea, and we were told it was going to be a 45 minute wait. We decided we’d ven­ture fur­ther afield, and made the mis­take of head­ing out to Ori­ent­al Parade, and Beach Babylon.

When we got there, it was really busy, but we thought surely it would be less than the 45 minutes wait at SMK, because there were free tables out­side. It was a bit breezy, so we were keen to sit inside – since there were no free tables they offered us one out­side and told us they’d give us the first free table inside. So we hopped up on stools crammed in the corner, and con­sul­ted the menu. Lots of things soun­ded tasty on the menu. K was happy that they had Fox­ton Fizz. I con­tem­plated order­ing a Pink Prin­cess, which was fizzy rasp­berry and vanilla ice cream, but I decided to pre­tend to be a grown up and order a latte bowl instead. So we waited for a wait­ress, and waited, and waited. Even­tu­ally one came up and told us that she could­n’t take our food order right now, because the kit­chen was slammed, but she’d be back to take our drinks order. Ser­i­ously? I appre­ci­ate the place was busy, but surely it is the job of the staff to man­age the work­flow. If the kit­chen was­n’t ready for our orders (which seems strange), the wait staff should still take them, and hold onto them, and let us know approx­im­ately how long a wait we could expect.

Five minutes later anoth­er wait­ress asked if we’d ordered already, and took our drink orders, clear­ing our menus away but not tak­ing our food orders. J’s diet coke and K’s Fox­ton Fizz arrived smartly, but while I was wait­ing for my large latte, we noticed anoth­er couple arrive and get seated inside. Umm, we were prom­ised that table, K told a wait­ress. There was clearly a lack of com­mu­nic­a­tion hap­pen­ing with the staff. My cof­fee came out – a small latte. I said that I ordered a large, the wait­ress looked con­fused. Anoth­er one came along and said “well this one is made, so take this and we’ll give you anoth­er one later,” in a par­tic­u­larly grumpy man­ner.  What a way to make a cof­fee extra bit­ter. I order my lattes large because I like them milky and less strong. Two cups would put me over the edge of caf­feine intake, but I should­n’t have wor­ried because of course I was nev­er offered the extra cof­fee. Oh, and I was charged for the large but by that stage I could­n’t be bothered fight­ing over the extra 50 cents.

Even­tu­ally we were told we could order our food now, and I went for creamy bal­sam­ic mush­rooms and haloumi with a side of kranskies, J went for the fish’n chips of the day (no word on what the fish was) and K ordered a savoury scone and a sweet muffin from their range of counter food. 10 minutes later or so, we spot­ted a table inside that had opened up, and asked if we could move there. The wait­ress said we could, but asked us to wait while she cleaned it up. Mean­while anoth­er wait­ress came out with K’s muffin and scone on sep­ar­ate plates. Not want­ing to have to juggle water and cof­fees and drinks, we asked if she could deliv­er them to the table in the corner where we were mov­ing to. She said she had no idea what we were talk­ing about, and told us to just take the food.

Finally we were inside where it was warm. K fin­ished her pal­lid scone and her appar­ently very aver­age muffin. My cof­fee was long gone. Still no sign of our food though. We checked our watches – we’d ordered 45 minutes before. I man­aged to catch the eye of a wait­ress to ask where our food was, and she asked me who had taken our order. Nev­er a good sign. I said I was­n’t sure, because of our jumbled ser­vice. A guy who I think was the man­ager came over and said there was a 45 minute wait. Now they tell us! But still, we’d waited that long and I told him so. He said he’d go see what had happened. I decided to use the magic trick of going to the bath­room to make the food arrive, and was inter­cep­ted by him to say that ours was lit­er­ally the next order up. Which sounds kind of sus­pi­ciously like they’d lost our orders to me, since we’d seen the people seated after us get their orders already. But any­way, five minutes later, we had our food. The fish and crinkle-cut chips looked tasty enough. My haloumi was good, my toast unbuttered, and if I can slip in one more com­plaint, I know the mush­rooms were billed as being bal­sam­ic, but they were just too bal­samicy, if you know what I mean. All up, I think we spent an hour and a half at Beach Babylon, which is an hour of our lives we’ll nev­er get back. I know that really we should have registered our com­plaints before we left, but it did­n’t appear that there was any­one there who would have listened. I’ve had very indif­fer­ent ser­vice there at lunch before, and thought I’d give them anoth­er chance, but after this debacle, I won’t be both­er­ing with their day­time ser­vice ever again though.