Cafe Mochi

My wife used to think that there was a curse on South Grand, in St. Louis.  This curse, was one best described as good food and bad service.  There are some great places on South Grand.  In fact, the only place that I have been, so far, that has good service and good food is called Meskerem.  The other places; Natasha's, The Vine, Lemongrass, and Cafe Mochi, have good food and bad service.

Cafe Mochi is a nicely done restaurant, selling Japanese and Asian food, along South Grand.  It may be the last restaurant in that area, on that side of the street.  It was a nice day outside and we chose to sit outside.  We noticed at least 3 people, wearing black, wondering around and talking to customers so I thought that there would be 3 servers at 10 tables which seems like a no-brainer.  But, little did I know that there was only 1 server, and two bussers.

After ordering and waiting about 25 minutes, we got our food. I had ordered their Kabob dish.  Be very careful when you order and look at the menu, because the way the menu was arranged, they had a list of specialty sushi rolls and then the last item in that list, was a Kabob platter.  The plate was described and in no way mentioned anything of being a roll or a sushi.  It just didn't make any sense.  The plate I had received looked like this:

So, it at least looked good.  The potatoes were seasoned and cooked, the salad was anemic, the meat was cooked thoroughly, the onions were still crunchy, the peppers were soft, the mushrooms were hard and the squash was hard.  It seemed some items were cooked perfectly and others were not.  The food was good and I'd give it a 3 out of 5 stars.

This is where the bad service gets displayed.  This restaurant with the above mentioned ones, all have a habit of getting the customer their food and then disappearing.  They never send a server or anyone to come back and ask how the food was, how we are doing or if they can get us anything else.  They don't come back when someone spills their drink, they don't bring everything ordered and they basically just act like they took care of the customer and they sit back and wait for their tip.  The problem we have with these types of servers, is that they don't get our normal tips.  

I know that the cost of the food and labor and the main payments of the chefs are in the cost of the food.  So, the amount I tip, goes to the server.  If service was bad, I tip as low as 15% or even 10%.  If the service is great, I'll go as high as 20%.  In this place, when we ask the server a question, she would say "ok" and then not come back or not get us different drinks, or the food we had ordered, etc.  It seemed that she thought that she would just deliver stuff and hide.  Now, she paid a lot of attention to other tables, and even stood and talked at some, but at ours, she tried to stay away.