Tonight I went for dinner at a place called Bennigans, thats right next to the Miami International Airport, conveniently located right next to the hotel I’m staying at tonight. To be to the point, I was very disappointed.
First off, on the menu, they have a picture of a full pint, 
with big arrows pointing at how regular pints fill up to ‘this’ certain line, but theirs fill up to ‘this’ certain line. We received a pint that was about the size of a glass you usually get in a hotel room in a plastic wrapper. Very unimpressed. The folks took a lot of offence to this, egged on by me, they complained, and we eventually got a 1/3 or so of the mug filled up to make up for the lacking pint. Sure, this is alright, but seriously now. If your a manager of a restaurant, and somebody complains about their pint being pint sized, and you know that the flyers are lying, not to mention that you’ve watered down the pints, do you not give them a full, complimentary pint? I would. But then again, its a restaurant thats besides the airport, which means very few returning customers, and the staff seemed about the ‘just graduated’ age. So, I guess things are becoming more clear.
We sit around, me finally with my bottled bear (a buddy of mine once said: “I always get bottles of beers because each one is especially brewed for you”. I now see his point.
Dinner is served. Let me first say that it was tasty, yes. How can a beef dinner not be tasty smothered in gravy? yai. SO I will not fuss further about the meal. No, wait, I will.
My meal was beef soup or something like that, which was basically chuncks of beef mixed with some red potatoes. Yum. yes, yum. But the side they gave me, was mashed potatoes. Red Potatoes. Kinda odd no? I did, as it said on the menu, have a choice between about 8 other sides (substitute the mashed red potatoes for them) but, I did in fact receive a caesar salad to start with too. So, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t deal with. But really, its odd to be smothering your potato chunks with mashed potatoes…. If you ask me.
So the fellow that was serving us did have some fast service, and he humbly and care-ingly accepted the complaints we put forth. But, at the end of the day, what is a tip for? Service, enjoyment, the whole experience? Yes I think so. So, at a place like this, where we were very unpleased with a few things, but satisfied with a few other things, how do you decide?
We found out, that a gratuity was already automatically added onto the bill for us, at 15% so we didn’t have to debate how much to tip. I didn’t like this part of the whole deal. Tipping is for service thats already known to be very good, at a place thats very classy and only really rich people go there. This place was more like a run down Red Robins, or a Chucke Cheeses. I was very unimpressed with this little fact that was added on the bill. Automatic gratuity. We should have definitely raised a lot more stink there than we ended up raising, but let it be known from here on forth, I, or we, will never again visit a Bennigans.
The end.
