I sometimes write a review of a hotel or restaurant for TripAdvisor. This week I got one rejected for not following their guidelines. I thought it was rather a good one myself. It was for the Mercure Royal Hotel in Hull, England, and it went like this:
Hotel was fine, room comfortable, clean and quiet if a little on the small side for a hotel of that type, but the breakfast was cringing, or it was for me. You help yourself from metal chafing dishes containing sausage, bacon, baked beans, scrambled egg, mushrooms, grilled tomato and triangular hash browns – nothing wrong with that in itself but the quality was very ordinary, I recoiled at the smell. The bread was white or off-white sliced that you could run through a toaster, the coffee came from one of those thermos jugs you get when you go to a conference or meeting. Not good enough. There were a few slices of cheese turning up at the edges from low take-up and some fruit, some croissants and cinnamon swirls, which is what I ate rather than hold my nose and swallow the cooked breakfast. But we are freaks, most people in the dining room pile their plates high and tip over it the salt, HP Sauce or both, and when the waitress comes to clear their empty plate say thank you very much, I enjoyed that.
Something occurred to me in the restaurant at the Royal which is that if you are going to have staff in a restaurant, you’d be best advised to employ people who by and large look healthy, it’s good for the image. The staff at breakfast at the Royal consisted of two women who were massively overweight and limped while they waddled, plus one who had been clearly so wracked by cigarettes she was by contrast thin and bent and also limped, and one who did indeed look healthy and a good advertisement for the place and did not limp: she was Polish!
Trouble is, these Yanks don’t know nuffin about the norf-sahf divide in the UK, see. They probly think I have some sort of agenda. So I feel quite proud of having written something perceptive and contentious, what has gone over the head of the moderators.
