Ohana my butt

I meant Ohana, the new resto in SM Megamall, not "family" as it means in the Hawaiian language. There's this new eating place beside Yellow Cab in Megamall second floor building A, Ohana Hawaiian BBQ, which boasts of, you guessed it, Hawaiian barbecue and what-have-you. What the hell's so Hawaiian about the place, anyway? The attendants wear Hawaiian shirts, yes, but they look more like floral shirts Mayor Lito Atienza would wear. They don't even have leis to look more authentic. Not all of the food they serve even have pineapples. Fakers!

My boyfriend and I only tried it out because it was like sparkling new and I was freaking hungry. Like cranky hungry. Once you enter the restaurant, you so know that the smell will cling onto you like a blood-parched leech. Good thing there are seats outside the resto, though. My boyfriend ordered the pork katsu thingy, and I, the very unoriginal pork barbecue. It was a semi self-service place so you go line up at the counter and wait for your food at your table. My boyfriend got his food after a few minutes. And because he's a nice guy (who wasn't as hungry as I was), he waited for my food to arrive before taking a bite of his fancy-named breaded porkchop.

A free bookmark slash

reminder to never again.

We were talking and talking so we didn't notice that I wasn't served my food yet, even after 30 minutes of waiting. I'm not exagerrating. 30 minutes. It's not as if we were in some fancy resto. Not even, say, Teriyaki Boy or Italiannis serve food that long. So my boyfriend went up to the counter to follow-up my order. Okay, so Ohana was probably only a few days old when we went there yesterday, so it's quite understandable that they'd screw up somehow. The thing is, however, they never even apologized for the delay. Not a "sorry" or even just a "pasensya na." Nothing. Nothing! Can you believe it? Not even a pretense of admission of wrongness? And to think they probably wouldn't have served my food if my boyfriend didn't kill them with sarcasm (they should be thankful, though, that he didn't do worse). We both knew why they were so unaccommodating; my boyfriend and I look younger than we really are and thus weren't given the respect we deserved as much as all other paying customers. Fakers. Fuckers. I knew I earned more than those other older-looking folks in the place.

The most unbelievable thing, however, is my food wasn't even warm when it was served! It would've had more heat if I had just left my plate out on the street in the afternoon. In fairness, the food wasn't bad. I don't know, maybe it would've been warm if they had served it, oh I don't know, like 25 minutes earlier. Those wannabe Hawaiians slash Friday's-Italianni's-Fish & Co. rejects should be grateful that because they served my food like ten million years later, I was too hungry to notice if it tasted good or bad. But then, anything barbecued is good, anyway.

I'm really patient with food servers; I've always been afraid of having disgruntled attendants spit on my food. If these Ohana people had only apologized for taking so long to serve my not-so-special-in-execution pork barbecue, I wouldn't have even written this. And I wouldn't have sworn not to eat there ever again.

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I don't care if the real Ohana folk (those that own the US franchise) check their website's referring pages and see this post (that's oozing with links to their site). They better give their Filipino partners a good lecture (or better yet, a good ass whipping) on customer service.