The Back Wall

Our experiences at the 200 Victoria St Fran’s Restuarant location (right by the Toronto Eaton Centre) are what inspired this blog in the first place. It’s even where we solidified our policies on tipping - it’s here that we left the $10 tips on $15 bills and $0 tips for bad service. So settle in for a long one!

We live literally a couple minutes’ walk from this location, so it was an obvious choice for us to go to whenever we didn’t feel like cooking (which is often). Matt and I used to go about once a week, and once his sister moved into our building we started going even more, around 2-3 times a week. The food was good and didn’t break the bank, and the service was, for the most part, okay.

There were some servers that sucked. And these servers didn’t get tipped - after all, we were regular customers and regularly tipped 20-30% and more for decent service. But as time went on, the good servers tended to go on to bigger and better things. It seemed that only the disgruntled servers were left, with a few exceptions. Because of this, we quickly learned the names of these “exceptions,” as it came to a point that we had to ask to be served by them in order to get our food within a reasonable amount of time from being seated and with anything resembling a smile.

We got on really well with the two best servers in the place. Then one of them left - we now had to try to figure out when the only good one left was working so we could request him. That’s not to say that everyone else was the worst ever, and some of them were even pretty good, but they weren’t our favourites that we had got into the habit of asking for.

This one server that was left was great - he’d chat with us, he’d give us our drinks for free (and we’d up his tip accordingly), he’d apologize if our food was taking a while or didn’t come out the way we ordered - and he’d make it right. We became friends with our server! Then he left to go to Italy for eight months.

So now we were left with “the rest”. And yes, I’m sure we didn’t make it easier on ourselves - first because a lot of the servers probably didn’t like us specifically requesting their co-workers over them, but also because we now had really high expectations. But we still ate at other restaurants from time to time, so we were still able to keep our expectations in check, and there were other servers that we still liked. So we continued to go, despite the fact that every time we went, the quality of the food got worse and the portions got smaller for the same cost. But this isn’t a food review blog so we’ll leave that to the experts (although the presentation and value do tie in with customer service so that’s taken into account).

We found that although we still had half-decent service sometimes, others were horrid. And these were new people that wouldn’t have known that we had asked for specific servers in the past, so it wasn’t that they held that against us. One of the last times we went, we were seated at a table for close to 10 minutes before our server even came over to bring us water and take our drink orders. In the past, our food would have been on the table in that amount of time. And it wasn’t that it was busy. We were just getting up and putting our coats on to go somewhere else before the server finally acknowledged we were sitting there - and we continued leaving.

The very last time we went to Fran’s, we had a lady who was not happy to be there. She seemed very stressed and made no attempts to hide how unhappy she was. I ordered chocolate chip pancakes. She brought out our food and left. My pancakes were not cooked properly - at least 1/3 to 1/2 of each pancake was raw batter. But our server never came by to ask how everything was for me to be able to send them back (we later saw she had been standing just out of sight reading a magazine the entire time). I didn’t make a fuss, I just ate around the raw bits.

Finally when everyone else was finished eating and I had a plate of the uncooked remains of my pancakes, another server came to clear our plates. She noticed that my plate was full of batter, but at first thought I had just picked my pancakes apart. When I told her they were raw, she took the plate away and went to show it to someone. She came back and apologized.

After all this, our own server finally came back to give us our bill. I thought that they would have taken the pancakes off, since they were severely undercooked. But they were on there. So, again not making a fuss, we paid (no tip) and left.

When we got home, Matt wrote an email to Fran’s telling them that we were regular customers and what we had just experienced. And their response? Nothing. We never heard back from them. And we haven’t been back since.

Overall customer service rating at Fran’s Restaurant (200 Victoria St., Toronto): 0/10
Which is sad to say, because at one point I’d have given them a perfect score.