Wagamama

Dear Sir/Madam,

I ate at one of your establishments in Spitalfields recently and for the most part the experience was a satisfactory one. The seating offered all the comfort one would expect from a wooden bench and the staff did their best to accommodate our party of eleven. I ordered the breaded chicken and sticky rice with curry sauce – and you need to sell that sauce in supermarkets, by the way, so I can bulk-buy and then bathe in it – and it was delicious. The only fly in the ointment was the apparatus I was expected to eat it with; chopsticks are not the implements of choice for most Western people. I cannot speak for the whole of Europe, but here in the UK we like to eat out with the sole intention of shovelling as much food into our face-holes as possible. It is impossible to do this with chopsticks, especially if you were saddled at birth with chubby sausage-like digits like yours truly. I very much understand you’re trying to replicate the experience of eating at a genuine Japanese noodle-bar, but when a customer requests a knife with which to eat their dinner, I think there should be some available. I was told by the waitress that there were no such implements for diners to use and that I’d have to soldier on with my set of chopsticks and a spoon. I’m sorry sirs, but a spoon quite literally does not cut it!

As it were, I struggled on with my meal – how I wished I had ordered the soup! – and subsequently spent about an hour ferrying my food to my mouth, four grains of rice at a time. I hope you take my suggestions on board and if you cannot provide knives to guests, at least warn them in advance to bring their own cutlery. Frankly, this refusal to acknowledge and accommodate Western eating habits shows an unwillingness to assimilate to British culture. I find this unacceptable.

Yours patriotically,

Derek Haselhurst-Horton