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Oliver Cross: Giant meatballs and customer satisfaction
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross talks giant meatballs and customer satisfaction.
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Locked in a world of giant meatballs
I've decided there's a worrying connection between Ikea, casinos and visions of hell, although probably only because I'm scared of big shops.
Ikea and casinos (and I'm thinking here of the prairie-sized slot machine floors of Las Vegas casinos) are other worlds; they exist quite separately from the streets we live in.
There are no windows, no weather, no sense of time and in both (I think, though my memory of Las Vegas casinos is hazy) there are no distracting music or jingles advertising special deals to recall you to life.
Human voices are muffled and buried by the immense surroundings, and your fellow shoppers or gamblers seem tormented souls fixed on one idea and condemned to pursue it to eternity, or at least until they can find the exit, which is more or less the same thing.
Occasionally you have to kick yourself to realise that you are not in some circle of hell, you're in Birstall, so pull yourself together.
But I still can't help worrying, every time I visit Ikea, that I may have been captured by a weird Scandinavian cult. Cult members must only eat Swedish food, they must understand Swedish screw sizes, they must, as a test, be able to pronounce the names of the many Ikea product lines which, although Ikea is a global company, only make sense to Scandinavians (Liding, Utby, Hovskr, or Grundtal for example).
They are instructed that if they follow the Ikea path righteously, they may one day be connected to the Great Soul, which takes the earthly form of a giant meatball.
Oh dear, I think I may be becoming unhinged, which is generally what happens when I enter large shops. I did warn Lynne but she said we needed a new kitchen and this was the place to go.
She was right of course; I have to say that Ikea, despite its sinister cult overtones, sells a comprehensive range of solidly-built, stylish furniture at affordable prices and I worship at its altar (altars in hard-wearing beech laminate are available from 7.50).
My only complaint, apart from having to lug all your purchases around even though you didn't sign on as a warehouseman, is that Ikea kitchens are fitted with mixer taps only.
I've thought and thought about this and can see no advantages at all in mixer taps and don't know why they make them. True, they are half as likely to break down as separate taps but if the mixer tap breaks, you're in twice as much trouble.
The great disadvantage of mixer taps is that the pipes are constantly contaminated by hot water so it's impossible to get really cold, refreshing water unless you run the mixer tap for ages or spend lots of money on special fridges or water coolers... oh, now I get it.
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Keep the customer satisfied
Two interesting incidences of how to keep the customer satisfied this week.
Firstly Lynne, on her way to work, went to Stephenson's the butcher (mentioned in last week's column but only because Lynne works near there, not in an attempt to get the rake-off I so richly deserve) to buy a ham salad sandwich to eat for lunch.
The assistant piled the salad in great quantities on to the bread, closed the sandwich then mysteriously wrapped up the ham separately.
Noticing Lynne looking at her oddly, she explained that the freshly-cooked ham, still slightly warm, would wilt the salad now but it would be fine to add it to the sandwich at lunchtime. Judge for yourself whether this is the sort of thing at all likely to happen at Subway.
Incidence two concerns the Olive Tree Greek restaurant in Headingley, Leeds, where, being cheapskates even before we could use the credit crunch as an excuse, we selected our meal from the three-course early-bird menu, which committed us to eating two puddings we didn't particularly want because it worked out cheaper than eating two courses on the regular menu – and roll on my lottery win so I can spend more time enjoying my food and less time bothering my head with elaborate cheapskate restaurant calculations.
Anyway, we ended up asking for one yoghurt dish and two spoons for us and one wrapped-up pastry dish to take home to Lynne's daughter Holly.
Which is the sort of request I don't normally make in very superior restaurants because I feel intimidated when the waiting staff all seem to socially superior to me on account of being graduates of Cheltenham Ladies' Collage or the Foreign Office.
However, the Olive Tree staff, all continental and therefore more interested in food than social distinctions, were happy to meet our pudding requests and even wrapped up Holly's pastry in a home-made foil swan, which was way beyond the call of duty.
Incidentally, the Olive Tree is currently the YEP Oliver Restaurant of the Year, but that has nothing to do with me because I am a quite separate entity from the restaurant critic Oliver and I would have been a bit more critical than him in my estimation of the Olive Tree.
Frankly, the home-made foil swan, even though two or more of the waiters collaborated on it, turned out to be rather amateurish and looked, as one waiter suggested, a bit like a squashed dinosaur.
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Sunday 05 February 2012
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