Al Presidente: by-the-book tourist trapping
We’re walking in the busy streets of Trevi, Rome’s most touristy dining area. It’s late, we haven’t had dinner yet, and time is passing.
We walk past Al Presidente, a restaurant with a terrace, music and many people at the tables. We kinda like the atmosphere, so we stop to take a look.
A waiter immediately comes and asks us to come in. We don’t like being interrupted, so we start to walk away. But then we stop again, and do some more thinking. We’re getting hungry and tired of searching, and the place seems to have a good atmosphere. Busted! We go and sit at a table.
A waiter comes to take our order. The prices here are outrageous, and we’re not _that_ hungry. We order a salad, grilled vegetables and a beer. We carry on discussing and taking photos.
The waiter seems a bit rude. Our first impression must have been right, we’re thinking. But they’re like that to everyone, and no-one seems to mind. Maybe we’re mistaken.
We get our salads, and Lore doesn’t like hers. One of the ingredients is bitter (meant to be like that, apparently), and the rest are too oily. She’d like to change. We call the waiter, and ask if he could bring something else. Broccoli should be fine – what could go wrong, we’re thinking. He doesn’t like our attitude – how dare we ask for something else, we’re getting from his tone. He offers first to change the problem ingredient for something else, but then he accepts taking everything away and replacing it with broccoli. Wow, that went surprisingly well, we’re thinking! Though at this point, we just want to finish eating and leave.
The broccoli arrives fast. It’s overcooked, and tasteless. Well, we can’t change again, of course. And after all, it’s broccoli. Let’s just eat it and be done with it.
We finish and ask for the bill. The bill arrives, and surprise! We’re being charged for the grilled vegetables, not the tasteless broccoli!
We call the waiter, and explain the problem. He mumbles something back, and then leaves and ignores us. We call him again, and explain the problem again: we had broccoli, so we should pay for broccoli. Now we really pissed him off! He tells that we ordered grilled vegetables, and they cooked it, so that’s what we should pay for. We should be thankful we’re not paying for both!
We keep complaining, and then another waiter comes. “29 Euros. You pay and then you leave!” They’re all blowing smoke through their ears.
We pay, and then ask for our bill back (they had it), and a receipt. Meanwhile, a lady from a neighboring table is asking Lore what happened; Lore is summarizing the problem, and the lady sympathizes with us. But not for long. A waiter immediately comes and stops the conversation. Oh, Lore, you’ve been a bad girl!
…A waiter comes and aggressively hands me a receipt – he’s doing me a big favor, you see: they never bring real, printed receipts there. We take the receipt, and then go out the terrace and take a few photos of the place. Lore is shaking with fear (seeing how aggressive they are). But then I realize that the detailed list of what we ordered isn’t on the receipt. Well, that needs to be there, cause we plan to report this somewhere. I go back in to ask for it.
“What the hell now?” I can read on everyone’s faces. I can see a waiter calming down another, so as not to become physical. The owner comes to “deal” with me, in a shouting voice. I try to explain what I want, but they don’t understand. He asks me where I’m from, maybe we can find another common language but English; I say I’m from Romania. He brings a Romanian guy from the back, so we can understand each other. Good idea, I have to say. I explain what I want, and now they understand. They make the detailed bill again, while patronizing Lore and me in Italian and using curse words in Romanian (“pula” means “dick” in my language).
We’re ready to leave. It’s not the perfect start for our romantic honeymoon in Italy, but hey, it’s something to tell stories about, right? And plus, we’ll get our revenge soon – we just need to write a complaint and send it to some Consumer Protection Agency or something. Looking forward to it!
The Complaint
I couldn’t sleep that night till I finished writing the complaint. That was good, cause we also had other things to do the next day than to file our complaint. In the morning, we spent some time googling for some kind of office to send the complaint to. Shouldn’t be too hard, we thought, being used to the simplicity of handling things online and via phone in Finland. Even in Romania there’s a Consumer’s Protection Agency, with an online form for complaints, an address to send complaints by mail, and a phone-number for asking advice. After some time searching, all we could find was some shabby website, that had lots of useless info, but no support for action. We assumed this was the place to go, but weren’t even sure. We needed another way.
When I saw our host, I asked her if there’s some kind of office for filing complaints in Rome. She asked what had happened, and I showed her the Google translation of our complaint. She couldn’t believe what she was reading – she left whatever she was doing to come help us with the complaint. In a few minutes she managed to find a phone number where to call. She called there, and got the instructions: we needed to print our complaint, file it with the Carabinieri (a sort of Italian Police), and after that it would be published in some kind of journal made especially for publishing this type of complaints about service providers. We thought it was a bit weird to go to the Police, but hey, if that’s how things work here, fine, we’ll do it! She kindly printed the complaint for us, and we were on our way.
We first went to the Carabinieri office where we were staying, as the lady on the phone had said that any office would do; but the guys there said that they’re too far away from the location of the restaurant, and that we should go to the Carabinieri office in Trevi – which is the right jurisdiction. Ok, we’ll go tomorrow then, it will be on our way to our touristy things, we figured. We went the second day to the Trevi Carabinieri; a guy there asked us what we wanted, and we told him we wanted to file a complaint, and showed the paper. After spending some time reading it, the guy started explaining something about the difference between Polizia and Carabinieri (in Italian of course), and basically told us he can’t take in our complaint; there was no physical violence involved, he said, and plus, he knows the restaurant, and it had had no problems before (!!!). Somehow, my mind was hearing things like “oh, we know they’re causing some troubles, but they’ve paid their dues to us, so it’s all fine” or “you’re (Romanian) tourists, and they’re our own guys – why would we do anything to them?!”, or “you know, registering a complaint is a huge hassle to us – how about you just forget about it?”; …but I’m sure my mind wasn’t hearing very well…Right?
So, maybe it was the Carabinieri, maybe it was the lady on the phone, maybe it was simply the system. Either way, if you’re a tourist in Rome and have any kind of problem with a local restaurant, better not count too much on having anything done about it…Instead, just go on looking at the pretty buildings and spending lots of money on poor services, and then off you go.
Next, please!
