What is the world coming to?

Excellent service in the UK and a rubbish restaurant experience in the US: I’ve experienced both in the past fortnight. The fantastic service was not on this occasion from the eating or drinking-out sector. It came in the shape of the RAC, after the engine of my Volvo decided to seize up on the M6 on Sunday. Before going off at too much of a tangent, the point of this story is that it shows that quick, polite, friendly and unselfconscious service is not actually an alien concept to the British. The reason for my praise is down to the fact that after no more than 15 minutes after gliding to a halt on the hard shoulder, a patrolman was preparing to tow me off the motorway. The efficient service continued as the stricken car was then ferried home on a recovery lorry. Not the best way to spend a bank holiday weekend, and hardly enjoyable, but it could have been so much more stressful. Key to this was good communication and delivering on the promise. The other lesson in this for the hospitality market, where service is such an issue, is that examples of good practice can be found close to home, if you just take the trouble to look outside at other industries. Which brings me to the USA, for long seen as the source of everything exceptional in service culture. This last trip, I suffered one of my worst restaurant experiences. It was in a hotel on the New Jersey coast. Just about everything went wrong. Waiters forgot to tell us dishes were off the menu even when we had ordered them, food was late, the wrong dishes turned up and food was cold. It went on. It was only the second time I can remember being so angry that I refused to pay. Yes, it was that bad. The moral is that things can, and do go, wrong even in the US. Although, it probably serves me right for choosing a hotel restaurant. Luckily this was an isolated incident as I can report that the trip also included many more great eating-out occasions. One highlight was Public, on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan, with its fusion of New Zealand, Australian, Asian and US flavours. Another was Houston’s in mid-town Manhattan - always the ultimate in US chain restaurant experiences. So this is no time to give up on the US. What my leisure time experiences do teach you, however, is that the unexpected is always around the corner – for better or worse. Peter Martin is the co-founder of M&C Report and the creator of the Peach Factory