Tea for two, on the house

It was a cold and rainy day and we needed a place with soft sofas to sink in and a cup of hot tea. We headed to Tony’s Deli, a small Italian influenced bistro in the heart of Helsinki. The setting was perfect. It was past the lunch hour so the restaurant was quiet and we had the whole bar nook for ourselves. Perfect.

Since the lunch had quieted donwn, the waiters didn’t really pay any attention to us. But we found the tea service all laid out on the bar and helped ourselves. And happily we sat on the comfortable sofas for an hour or so and helped ourselves for a second cup.

When it came time to pay, we actually had to struggle to find a member of the staff but when we eventually found one and told that we’d like to pay for the tea. He told us that today the tea was on the house.

Obviously we had had helped ourselves for the tea service that was left behind from the lunch but still it was a pleasant surprise in a city where most of the time you end up paying 2-3 € for a cup of tea that more often resembles yesterday’s dishwater.

What would you do?

Say, you’re a waiterss in a cafe and you’re taking an order of hot water to a table. You accidentally spill hot water on the table cloth in front of your customer. It’s not chatastorphic but enough to make the table cloth damp just where your client might place her elbow. Wouldn’t you quickly apologize, put down your tray on a near by table and hurry to change the damp table cloth? You most certainly would not first hand the receipt of 1€ for the hot water to your customer, then ask if she’d like you to change the table cloth. Then ponder over the whether or not it is necessary to change the table cloth and eventually expect the client to lift up her cup, the sugar bowl and the tea tray. However this is exactly how it was done at Cafe Engel in Helsinki on Sept. 12. 2008

The moral of the story is that accidents happen. It’s how you recover from them that matters.

Imagine how the customer would have felt if everything would have been dealt with quickly and efficiently and she would have never had to see the bill?

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