Breakfast barney!

As ever, life always throws in a little bit of rain on your sunny days to restore some balance to things.

We've had an exceptional four days in Port Douglas and created some memories that will not leave both of us for a long, long time. Everything has been pretty much perfect, until this morning.

The shuttle bus to Cairns airport isn't until 4.30pm, so we have a lazy morning and head for brekkie just after 10ish. We sit down, order some chorizo on bread, and wait.

Then we wait some more. It's not that busy and everyone seems to have been served apart from us. So we wait a little bit more and then try to get the attention of the staff. No joy. They're busy doing something apart from cooking our breakfast. I reckon we've been here about 40 minutes and since people who arrived only 5 minutes ago are getting served and we can't get any attention, we decide to go and pay for the coffees and then leave.

We approach the counter and tell the waiter who took our order that we are going, and he looks, well, who knows what the expression was, just looked like he didn't care or didn't understand, so we still offer to pay for the coffees. Then he goes to the kitchen, without telling us what is going on, and then hell begins to open.

It's an open kitchen so we can see the chef and she starts ranting, the waiter comes back to us with no information so I'm suggesting we just go. Then the chef comes out with a face like fizz.
'Im cooking your food now, you cannot leave. It's being done right now.'
'We've been here 40 minutes and everyone else is being served before us. So we're going to pay for the coffee and leave.', I suggest.

'You have not been here more than 15 minutes, here is the ticket', she produces the ticket and waves it at us. 'I'm cooking it now, it'll be one minute and I will serve you personally.', she barks.

The prospect of sitting down with our tails between our legs and getting served by this pram-faced harridan is about as appealing as taking a dip in a bath full of funnel-web spiders, and now she has also accussed us of being liars. Mandy is still trying to pay for the coffee when the chef comes back out with two plates, and we say we are leaving anyway.

'This is good food', she cries. 'It is very specific.'

It is sausage and toast!!!

She then starts to get abusive, at which point Mandy walks off to avoid bloodshed, and I exchange a few pleasantries with the psycho chef before following suit.

'You are stealing my wages. I don't know where you are coming from.', she yells after us.

'I know where we're not coming back to.', I reply.

And so for the first time ever, we walk off without paying for anything, and she's still yelling at us when we're at the other end of the street. Neighbouring cafes are bemused by the whole thing, and who knows what the remaining customers are thinking.

It takes a good hour or so to fully calm down from something that could have been avoided with a simple 'We're sorry'; 'the kitchen is busy'; 'my dog died today'; 'the staff are incompetent and I am possessed by satan and his hairy minions'; standard type of excuse. Instead it escalates into something like the 'Dirty Fork' sketch from Monty Python.

See here for Details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk4_Bt0yNgw