Last weekend we experienced two contrasting treatments as customer.

The first instance is in Akashi Japanese Restaurant, Citylink Mall. It's an upper-middle-end type of restaurant ($20-40 perperson), so we kinda expect the service to be up to par, or to have Japanese kind of friendliness and politeness. To our surprise, the service turned out to be really crappy. All the girls who works there, seems to be very depressed with their job. They do not provide service with smile. Smile, is a basic thing that should absolutely be available in service industry. When we enter the door, they screamed some kind of Japanese word that I presume it means "welcome!". However, it was not done with any smile, friendly gesture, or eye contact. When we sat and start to flip through the menu, they were not responding well to questions we posed on the menu items. When the food were served they were rushing to put the trays on the table. They spilled the green tea on the floor and did not even apologize. We had to ask them to mop the floor, and when they do, they did not even ask for permission.

It is not that they are not doing their job, but it seems that they just want to get their job done and over as soon as possible. They don't have the sensitivity and friendliness towards their customer. For this kind of upper-end restaurant, I would expect the service to be more than fulfilling orders. However, we were disappointed to see that the service was... only mediocre. Even though the food served were high quality, we were not compelled to return to this place due to its bad service.

On the other hand, Maison de Fontaine was a reflection of excellent service. And it's more affordable compared to other French restaurant in Singapore! The food was excellent, I can say, it was work of arts. I was having pan-seared escalope of foie gras with tomato timbale, port wine, & balsamic reduction as entree, continued with grilled beef tenderloin (160y) with sauce bearnaise & pot gratin (which tastes great, but i am not really into the sauce bearnaise), and was closed with freshly baked apple tart with vanilla ice cream. Indi was having baked oysters w/ cheese (really tastes great!), whole spring chicken w/ madeira wine sauce (the chicken was amazingly lean, fat-free), and for dessert he was having creme brulle with berries. We came to the restaurant a bit late at night, and we stayed there until past the closing hour. Amazingly, the restaurant manager did not try to kick us out of the restaurant even though we stayed there until half an hour after the closing hour. The manager was really courteous. We are looking forward to having another great dinner there!