La Tasca - Bristol Cabot Circus

La tasca made me very disappointed!! The service was terrible!! I had a meal with my friend at La Tasca at Cabot Circus in Bristol and a waiter spilt the whole hot sizzling chili-&-garlic-infused oil in the batter on my friend's legs, jacket & mobile phone!! Can you imagine how this dish smelt like!?! The smell was so strong. I can accept that maybe the waiter was new to the job and not experienced, but the manager didn't even show up to apologise to us. We tried to clean the mobile as it was very oily & smelly and still paid for the meal. When we went back, my friend finally realised that his mobile didn't work coz the oil went into the electronics so he couldn’t hear when someone called him. So, living in Bath, and having to travel to Bristol to register a complaint to let La Tasca know that it was their mistake was very tiresome and awkward, as these trips had to be made outside of our working hours. A person’s mobile is very important in life, and it’s extremely difficult to live without mobile phone especially when we are both working!! We contacted the restaurant manager about the incident, who then told us he would consult his senior and inform us of the progress of our situation. However, after waiting for a couple of weeks we heard nothing more from the store. We contacted La Tasca several times via phone and told that we needed proof from a mobile store to confirm that the phone was indeed damaged, which we did in our own time and went back to the store only to witness that its customer service was really awful…we asked to talk to the manager but I met a senior waitress or supervisor…we’re not sure…instead. We couldn’t remember her name (or maybe we didn’t want to remember the dreadful moment there). When I showed the proof that the phone couldn’t be fixed due to the oil damage, she said that she had no authorisation to do this but she would tell her manager to contact us by tomorrow. We informed her that we had been told this many times that you would call us but we had received any phone call and that we had to come from Bath just to ask for their help in fixing a matter that we had no influence upon. So, we mentioned to the senior waitress that it’s time consuming coming to Bristol as we live in Bath and we had to pay for travelling expenses on more than one occasion. She snapped at me that she came from Reading to work here every day and has never been paid for her transportation!! Well, it’s different case, right? She came to work to get paid; we went there to ask for the thing we had the right to get!! We were so exhausted with La Tasca and don’t ever want to step into the La Tasca restaurant (any branches) anymore…I promise!! Finally, we were to be told that we would be contacted by the area manager (again). In our naiveness we believed them, only to be let down again. After further probing, we were eventually told to contact the claims department (more running around) about the incident. So we did, and for once they contacted us about the incident. It wasn’t the response we had hoped for – we were told that there had been no record of any incident such as this occurring at the restaurant we had eaten at and due to the period between the accident and the final reporting had been such a long time in between it was hard to solve this predicament. Imagine our annoyance at this response; spending so much worry and resources to attempt to reach a satisfactory conclusion, only to be told that nothing can be done!! On this occasion justice has not been served…