Order-in Nightmares: The Thai Grill (formerly Friendly Thai) on Eglinton Avenue

I enjoy posting food posts when I find a place that has great food, or great owners and are really deserving of more traffic but every now and then I need to post about places we have visited – or ordered from – which draws my ire and I feel I must address to prevent others from falling prey to the same mistakes we did and to allow the owners an opportunity to respond or at the very least clean things up.

Here is what happened to us Saturday night.  Please feel free to share your horror stories as well.

At 7pm we decided to order dinner online through JustEat, from a local Thai restaurant called the Thai Grill (formerly the Friendly Thai) a 5-10 minute walk from our house.  We had spent all of Friday night awake with a sick 2-year-old and she spend all of Saturday laying across one of us crying that her tummy hurt, throwing up periodically and not eating or drinking.  The thought her was that it should take us an hour to get the three of them into bed and the food was scheduled to arrive by 7:50.  Perfect.

We got the kids to bed, settled back in downstairs and noticed it was now 8:15 and there was no food.  My wife called the restaurant and was advised it was “going out in 5 minutes”.  We explained to the location that we were very close and that it shouldn’t be a long trip – they could just walk it over as other local places do.

By 8:30 we were back on the phone and this time the food had just left and we were promised that “something extra” had been included in our order as an offer of apology for the fact it took an hour and a half and no food.

At 9pm I called the restaurant and I explained to them it was getting late to eat and wondered where the food was – by this time I was sitting near the front door so they would not ring the bell and wake the kids (oh, the opportunity for irony there).  She said they were very busy and the driver had just left.  She told me we were further than 5 minutes away – like 10 minutes – so it would take 10 minutes before the food arrived.

At 9:15 I called – 15 minutes had passed – no food.  The restaurant sounded puzzled that no food had arrived yet.

By 9:30 I kept calling but this time no one answered and the voice mail box… You guessed it.  Full.

I wanted to tell them to keep their food but was worried that since we paid via credit card on Just Eat that it would be a hassle getting the money back – who would believe that no food came?

When I went online while waiting I saw a LOT of comments about the delivery being horrid but the food being good.  More on this later.

So around 9:45 the food showed up and guess what.  It was tepid in temperature and food was missing.  Of the 5 dishes we ordered – 2 soups, 2 spring rolls, pad Thai and basil chicken, the chicken was not there, nor were the spring rolls.  The delivery guy who leapt out of the car and ran across our neighbours lawn with our food while the driver did a u turn for their next delivery called the restaurant and promised to bring us the Basil Chicken in 20 minutes.  “Too late”, I said.  “10 minutes” he replied.  “I’ll bring you back the basil chicken, the spring rolls and the extra dish for the inconvenience in 10 minutes”,

Off he sped to apologize to the next delivery I suspect.

I waited up until 11pm for those dishes.  finally put up a note asking them not to ring the bell and I went to bed.  The next morning, I looked outside, but there was no food there.

So after an almost 3 hour wait for the food, we were completely disappointed.  It arrived lukewarm, and half of our order was missing.  It took 3 phone calls to track the order down, and the promised extra dishes for our inconvenience were conveniently absent.

The things that alarmed me the most was the actual food.  The soups were great, with my seafood soup leaving me wanting more – but these soups are made during the day and left to cook.  The quality of the rest of the food that had to have been prepared upon order was shocking.  The chicken spring rolls were soggy and oily and seemed to be missing the vital ingredient of chicken.  The Pad Thai tasted like it was made in a hurry with ketchup, not tamarind, and there were no peanuts, sprouts or lemon wedges as advertised on their menu and website.  Frankly, the only good thing to be said about this food was that the portions were large.  I felt like they forgot about the order – they got their money from Just Eat at 7pm, and threw together a joke of a meal for their “delivery” orders.

If these guys cannot get their act together to provide delivery then they should NOT be offering it.  We let Just Eat know this and we commented online and now you know.

I would try them again in their location but the games that came with the order – promises, not answering the phone, not doing whatever it took to satisfy us – not following through with food, means we will never order from this restaurant again.  As a matter of fact, I’m actually going to suggest you go somewhere else as well.  Somewhere that values your money.

The last time we had service this bad was the day ofter Passover about 25 years ago when Pizza Pizza brought our pizza 6 hours after we had ordered – they were busy too – and it was burnt.  They still wanted us to pay but instead he just gave us the food and we tipped the poor guy.

Talk about your experiences:

Update: Within a day of this being posted, I received a very kind note from www.just-eat.ca to see if they could assist in making things right, but the cool thing is that the day before my wife contact Just Eat and they made it right without any fuss.  They credited us back the items we never received and they gave us a $5.00 voucher towards any further order through their site which we will of course use since we have no issues with them – it’s not their fault – but they were super-professional and quick to put this issue behind us and for that they receive 2 thumbs up… WAY up.

Related articles

• Order-in Nightmares: The Thai Grill (formerly Friendly Thai) on Eglinton Avenue (urbandaddy.wordpress.com)

Beware the Ides of March! What the heck does that mean anyways? I’ll tell you!

So, today is March the 15^th.

Is there any way today could be as eventful as yesterday, March the 14^th, which was Pi Day (at 1:59am) and also one month after Valentine’s Day – which is known as Guy’s Wishful Thinking Day – or Steak and BJ Day.

But today… March 15^th…  something happened today which you may or may not know about depending on your age.  If you’re old enough you may know already that on this day in 44BC, Julius Caesar, the dictator of the Roman Republic was stabbed 33 times to his death in the Roman senate, by several Roman senators, led by Marcus Junius Brutus (Caesar’s protege) and his brother-in-law, Gaius Cassius Longinus.  So if suggests that you “beware the Ides of March” it means be careful your followers do not surround you and stab you to death in the head, neck and – gulp – groin.

March 15^th, 2011 was also the beginning of the Syrian uprising – interesting considering there is a dictator there too….

However today, Facebook did NOT shut down permanently as was being spread across the Internet as some sort of dumb-ass, barely believable hoax, however if it did, I would not be missing playing Cityville since my wife deleted it from her Facebook, then from mine in effort to restore 2 hours of our free time each day.  I suffered one day of withdrawal, then felt relief at not having to go in and play and bug people for stuff.  I’m free!

But back to the Ides of March:

The word Ides comes from the Latin word “Idus” and means “half division” especially in relation to a month. It is a word that was used widely in the Roman calendar indicating the approximate day that was the middle of the month. The term ides was used in Roman times to identify the middle of the month.  The Ides of March was a festive day dedicated to the god Mars and a military parade was usually held.

Apparently, a seer had foreseen that Caesar, the “Dictator for Life” of the Roman Empire would be harmed not later than the Ides of March and on his way to the Theatre of Pompey (where he would be assassinated), Caesar met that seer and joked, “The Ides of March are come”, meaning to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied “Aye, Caesar; but not gone.”

So while Caesar knew the senators hated him, he was still handed a warning note before entering but he did not read it, and he dismissed his security force not long before his assassination. After he entered the hall, he was surrounded by these senators who were holding daggers – never a good sign – with Servilius Casca striking the first blow, hitting Caesar in the neck. The other senators all joined in on the beat down, stabbing him repeatedly.

Marcus Brutus wounded Caesar in the groin and Caesar is said to have remarked in Greek, “You, too, my child?” which is where “es tu Brutus?” came from.

In an somewhat ironic turn of events the soap opera continued and Cassius and Brutus got what was coming to them when Caesar’s will left a guy named Octavian in charge of the Roman Empire as his adopted son. Cassius and Brutus tried to rally against the army and even had the foresight to issue coins celebrating the assassination of Julius Caesar, known as the Ides of March.  But adopted son and new leader Octavian’s forces defeated the Brutus and Cassius army 2 years later in the Battle of Philippa (in Greece) which resulted in the 2 committing suicide.

Who saw that coming, eh???

Octavian, later known as Augustus, ruled the Roman Empire for many more years.

If you want to know more, think back to high-school when you asked your English teacher when you were ever going to use Shakespear aghain in your whole life, since this meeting is famously dramatized in William Shakespeare‘s play Julius Caesar.

Happy Pi Day everyone!

Image via Wikipedia

Today is March 14th, so that makes it Pi Day!

For those of you who do not know what Pi is, an explanation follows.  If you do know, however, then you don’t have to read on, you can just go back to solving your quadratic equations with an abacus.

Pi or π – which looks a lot like a Hebrew letter, a table or Prince’s name when he wanted to be a symbol –  is actually the Latin name of this Greek letter and is pronounced “pie”.

Here is a little more information; some of it comes to me via Wikipedia – of course; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

So how does that Greek letter become part of modern day mathematics (the keeners always ask me this question), well it might be because “π” is the first letter of the Greek word περίμετρος which translated to English means perimeter.  The ratio of the perimeter to the diameter, is constant for all circles, so if it never changes old world scholars thought it must have a Greek or Latin name, hence Pi.

Some fun facts about Pi:

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th at 1:59am if you are on a 24 hour clock, or 1:59pm if not.

π is an irrational number, its decimal representation does not repeat, and therefore does not terminate.  This has fascinated mathematicians and regular people like you and I for year, as we try to recite Pi to as many decimal places that we can remember.

The decimal representation of π = 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510…

The Guinness Book of World Records record for remembered digits of π is 67,890 digits, held by Lu Chao, a 24-year-old graduate student from China. It only took him 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite π to the 67,890th decimal place without an error.

Crazy, eh?

Kids these days have too much time on their hands.

Anyways.

Happy Pi Day!!!

For those of you not celebrating the math-kind of Pi day today, you might be looking to celebrate a different kind of pie day today since today is also one month after Valentine’s Day so today is also Steak and a BJ Day.

Unfortunately, I saw this too late to celebrate… We have no steak in the house.

It was a deja vu on Friday… First cat pee, then rotten fish and chicken. UGH.

I knew Friday night that it was deja vu all over again.

Déjà vu is the experience of feeling sure that one has already witnessed or experienced a current situation, even though the exact circumstances of the prior encounter are uncertain and were perhaps imagined

Here was how I arrived at that situation, beginning with my Friday evening, when I went to see the Toronto Rock lacrosse game at 7:30pm at the Air Canada Centre, arriving home by 10:30pm, or just in enough time to go to hockey.  The plan was for me to race home,grab my hockey bag, pick up my buddy and head over to play some ball-hockey.  I’ve been playing in ball-hockey leagues for over 20 years, so I have done this before, but this was the first game after a lacrosse game and I had the subway to keep in mind as I travelled from downtown to mid-town Toronto. 

 Planning in advance, I brought up my bag from the basement and placed it on the coffee table in the family room, but I already knew something was wrong when I started to look inside for my required equipment.  Something that happened to me before, a long time ago was happening again.

Some background to put this story into context:  

When my wife and I got engaged, I moved in to her condo with her and her 3 cats.  The oldest one of these cats, the queen, was not very fond of change, nor did she particularly like anyone who took away her sleeping spot on the bed – so me.  She wouldn’t hiss or growl, but instead let out a long “MEOWWWWWWW” and with that she thought she was speaking English and those words were not kind at all.  In hindsight, they were probably threats.

Anyways, this cat showed us her displeasure after my second day living there when she emptied her bladder on urban mummy’s shoes which were sitting at the front door.  This was no accident.  It was a targeted attack because from that day forward, whenever we left shoes out at night, they were attacked.  All the while I suspect she was planning the biggest attack for me.  

One day I grabbed my hockey bag from the laundry room – or the front hall – I do not recall, and there was a foul smell and my bag was dripping.  I suspected that my water bottle had tipped over and I had forgotten to close it, since this had happened before.

I loaded my stuff in the car and raced over to the arena.  I arrived in the change room and proceeded to unload my equipment when the guy sitting beside me started to sneeze like crazy. 

He spun to me and asked me if I had cats. 

“Yes”, I replied, my wife does, “why?”

“I’m deathly allergic”, he said, “and my eyes are red now so I have to move to the other side of the room… Sorry” and with that, up he got and away he walked.

I then proceeded to take out my equipment and it was all wet.  My jersey, wet.  My towel, soaked, my socks, wet, jock, wet, gloves, wet… It was going to be a rough game since all my stuff was wet but my team needed me to play.

It was only once I was completed dressed when I looked back into my bag and noticed that the “water” that had spilled from my bottle was in fact yellow in colour…

BING.

The coin dropped.

The light went on.

The elevator hit the top floor.

That #$&#%$&$%&% cat peed in my hockey bag and now I’m fully dressed and about to play in urine. 

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

But my team needed me and I had to go out so I sucked it up for the team and played.

Fast forward to Friday night.

All three of those cats have since passed on and we have a newish cat who is not a very nice cat but he has never peed on anyone’s clothes.  There was a different issue at play here.

On Wednesday, my wife noticed that our standing freezer in the basement had turned off and fully defrosted, thawing everything that was inside of it including 9 giant salmon heads which I picked up for our nanny to feed her Thursday play group.  The melted ice, and blood and goop from the fish, and chickens which thawed leaked all over the floor in the storage room, and sitting on the floor in that room was, you guessed it, my hockey bag.

Now I’m not sure if that crap got sucked into the back through the bottom or if someone dropped a towel inside but this bag smelled horrid and was not only wet, but it was sticky. 

I removed a lot of the stuff that I did not need to play and I left it in the laundry room, but this team also needed me Friday night and I thought how bad could it be compared to cat pee.

Let me tell you… It was worse.

I got to the arena, changed and very reluctantly put on some very wet, very smelly equipment.  As I slid my hands into the gloves, not only were they wet, but they were slimy and for a good 10 minutes while warming up, I could not hold my stick and my gloves were always sliding off.  I even tried rubbing my hands in the faces of my opponents to see if it would deter them from destroying us, but it didn’t.

I was the stinky guy, but very much unlike the stinky guy who never cleans his equipment or washes his clothes.  I was the stinky guy covered in rotting food who squished too.  It was so bad, I could not even place my head down on the bench for fear that I would catch a whiff of my own jersey.

On the bright side, we only lost 10-1.

I raced home, showered a VERY long and very hot shower and ran all my equipment and hockey bag through the wash twice with a lot of soap.

Tonight, I have another game and before that game I intend on washing my stick, mouth guard, helmet and water bottle.

UGH.

It was deja vu of the worst kind.

I told this story to my wife and she said in both instances she would NOT have played.  In both cases my team needed me.

Would you have played?  Would it change your decision if you knew your team needed you there and playing? 

Thursday Thirteen – Taxation Related

As a taxation professional, it was only a matter of time before I posted a Thursday Thirteen that was taxation related.  I have a timely post this week around tax season – Canadian style – however some of it crosses the globe.If you ever want to read more taxation information or read my thoughts on managing, you can do so at www.intaxicating.wordpress.com.

But in the meantime, with tax filing season fast approaching, here are the 13 things you need to know before you file your 2011 tax returns;

13.  Contrary to popular belief of those on the left and those silly “Occupy” folks, in Canada (and the US), the top 10% of Canadian earners pay half of all personal income taxes, while the half of earners with the lowest income pay less than a tenth (1/10th) of the total. So those in the driver’s seat, the high and middle-income earners, they DO have some choice as to how much they want to spend and how much they plan to save, so by spending less, they pay less consumption taxes, less property tax, less gasoline tax, and other taxes and user fees – bank fees, late fees. interest on credit cards, etc., 

12.  Regardless of where you are and what you do, you really should file a tax return.  Canadian reporting is voluntary in certain conditions, but be sure before you pass on filing.  The CRA has a great list of when you need to file and why you should file right here;  http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/ndvdls/tpcs/ncm-tx/flng-blgtns/menu-eng.html

11. You have the option to defer the paying of taxes, in some cases, when you save for retirement inside a RRSP / IRA or any other form of registered retirement savings plan.  In these plans, you defer payment of income taxes until later in life.  There are taxes assessed, when you withdraw the money after you have reached a certain age, usually 65-years-old, but those tax rates are probably lower than you would be paying now, if you have above-average income.

If your income is below average, you may be better off to pay taxes now and save in a tax-free savings account (TFSA).

If you save for your family inside a registered education savings plan or a registered disability savings plan, there will be a deferral of taxes on interest earnings, other investment returns and government grants. Then the child or other relative will likely pay little or no taxes on those savings.

10. Before you file make sure you have all your slips.  Amending sucks and looking for them last-minute can cause a lot of stress.  Trust me on that one.

9.  Make sure the government has correct information for you – address, name, direct deposit because you want your refund and if they audit you, they might not be re-assessing you, but rather they may be looking for an additional copy of a receipt they lost in the processing of 20 million tax returns.  Get to it and get to it quickly.  Do not ignore government mail and not open it.  Open it and action it..

8.. File this one electronically – but keep your receipts handy for audit and verification purposes.  It’s quick, you may get your money earlier and you’re saving trees,  My kids say thank you..

7.  If you owe money, do not write a note and attach it to your return, but contact the government and make a payment arrangement and honor it.  When your paper return comes into the processing centres, the processors, who are usually temporary hires to help the CRA get through the tax season, rip of cheques and process them right away, then they tear off any unnecessary paperwork and send the returns to a data processing group.  So if you include a piece of paper or maybe gold glittery powder, it’s in the classified waste bin right away.,

6. Think before you bitch – A third of all income in Canada is paid in taxes. But before you consider moving out of the country, consider that the Canadian tax burden is less than that of 19 other developed nations.  We, as Canadians only pay more taxes than 10 developed nations.

5. Why all the taxes?  Where does this tax revenue go?  With the tax revenue, 62% of it goes to pay for health care, education and social assistance, including unemployment benefits.  The rest, a measley 38% goes for everything else we need, like infrastructure, social programs, etc.  Not such a bad deal afterall, eh?

4. Not everything is taxed, here are some examples – There is no tax on a winning Lottery tickets, on scholarships, inheritances, gifts, the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) to the taxable Old Age Security (OAS) pension, Canada Child Tax Benefit cheques or child support payments after a divorce.  You pay no tax on at least the first $9,000 of waged earnings or $40,000 of income per year if you receive only eligible corporate dividends and $18,000 if you receive only capital gains.

3. On the flip side, some high-tax items – The income tax rate on income beyond $127,021 a year in 2010 was 46.4%. Taxes on cigarettes in Ontario was 63.5%; alcohol, 52.7%; and regular gasoline, around 36%.

2. The HST effect – The combined 13% federal and Ontario sales tax, the HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) has boosted the incentive to conserve energy, because provincial sales tax did not apply to energy before July 1, 2011 – Thank you Dalton! – So you will save more if you choose a compact, well-insulated home close to your job and buy fuel-efficient vehicles – like my hybrid vehicle – appliances, lighting – get those halogen, CFC-free bulbs, and furnaces.

1. Tax relief opportunities – Numerous tax breaks and benefits aim to encourage you to better yourself or the economy, such as seek higher education, earn high grades, raise children, move closer to a job, belong to a professional group, take public transit, make charitable and political donations, invest in companies, start a small business, and save for retirement.  So get cracking. 

There are some easy wins here and some clear opportunities to save money and where we are all letting money slip through out fingers.

But whatever you do, get it there on time!  No point in paying the government a late filing penalty of $400.00 for your procrastination.

 

Related articles

• 2012 income tax season: 11 questions you are afraid to ask (moneyville.ca)
• CRA probing high-flying TFSAs (business.financialpost.com)