The Raffles Hotel

The fingers began drumming the table. The pangs of hunger were getting unbearable and the conversation was trickling down to a pathetic dribble where we resorted to doing Julie Bishop emoji faces.

As time marched on and the harsh midday sun morphed into full-blown afternoon we scanned the packed beer garden of the Raffles Hotel where everyone else also appeared to be suffering the same food deficit.

"Do you know Australia rates as the second worst country in the world for customer service?" offered one at our table as she stared disconsolately at the melted ice in her Tanqueray tumbler.

"What's the first? Russia?" countered the longsuffering hubby drily, as a blur of waiters whizzed by trying to cope with the demands of being ridiculously understaffed during a - no pun intended here - Labour Day holiday rush.

A quick check on the internet reveals that the jury's still out on the service issue. Depending on who is conducting the survey, Australians are either the third happiest customers in the world or our service stinks, especially in hospitality. And what better place to argue that Aussie waiters are born with no peripheral vision and that the penalty loadings are too high, than the al fresco area of the newly revamped Raffles Hotel.

Here, in art deco splendour, the owners Colonial Leisure Group pay homage to the late Bon Scott, a former patron in the 60s along with the rabble-rousing bikies and colourful live bands. In these more genteel times the place welcomes well-heeled south of the river folk and it's just the bikers, the boys in lycra, who are banned.

Even so, the upstairs Highway Bar is all about bad boy tartan. It's named after the AC/DC hit Highway to Hell which was inspired by the dangerous 17-kilometre stretch of Canning Highway on which Scott used to burn some serious rubber. However, things may have been vastly different if Scott had endured an excruciating 45-minute wait for his hamburger with beetroot. We would all now be singing Highway to Hunger.

I say excruciating because, for us it wasn't just the long wait for small plates of Fremantle octopus ($19), pork and fennel meatballs ($14) and bigger dishes of char-grilled chicken ($32), crab spaghettini ($34) and scallop and pancetta risotto ($28).

Let me stress here that the food, under the helm of chef Dan D'Vauz, was good, even if it did all arrive in one fell swoop. Better than good. It was outstanding, in dishes like the octopus and panfried potato mix where a glossy aioli melded tender occy with earthy spud. It rocked too in the simple marinated spring chicken which is the sort of golden brown crispy bird people dream about gnawing every last bit of flesh from the bone.

The risotto, too, was delectable – the old favourites of scallop and pancetta meeting in a molten lava of loveliness topped with Reggiano shavings.

No, the excruciating bit was walking in to the heritage-listed art deco building, with the restaurant in full flight, and feeling as uncomfortable as Tony Abbott at a feminist convention or someone wearing lycra.

The earlier phone call to make a booking had been met with "We leave the al fresco area open for walk-ins so just come on down", which made it an ad hoc sort of affair from the start.

With no one welcoming diners or explaining the ordering procedure it turned into a DIY exercise with the diners filling in all the dots. Do you order and pay at the bar? Where are the menus? Where is the water? Can you have a bar tab? Do you have to have a bar tab? Oh, you have to have a table number? Where is the number? On the actual table. And so on and so on, which made even considering waiting at the bar to get a second glass of Trapeze chardonnay out of the question.

Intrigued by it all and knowing that Colonial Leisure Group's other Perth venues – Print Hall and The Royal – are two of the smoothest operators in town, I phoned the manager, Andrew Donovan, the next day.

"Oh, you came on the worst day possible," he says. "It's a Catch-22 situation on public holidays for hospitality venues. We had to gauge how busy we were going to be and we got double the amount of people – 233 diners – that we had for Australia Day.

"In paying our staff $50 an hour instead of the normal $22.53 it's hard to predict how many staff we need. Also we don't charge a 15 per cent surcharge."

He also agreed that, with many other outlets choosing to close on the public holiday, punters had decided to descend on The Raffles.

Points taken, but if a venue opens, does the customer deserve to expect a level of service that lives up to the reputation?
Can I answer with an emoji?

Scoring system:

0-10 Don't waste your money
11-15 Worth a look
16-20 Put it on your bucket list