Tonight Mel celebrated her birthday at Ping Pong at Goodge Street. There were about 20 of us at the dinner and our experience tonight has proved that Ping Pong do not do group meals very well at all.

First of all chaos reigned when we couldn’t all fit on to the table and somehow Mel lost out on the game of musical chairs we had to play to work out where everyone was sitting. Then it was up to us to sort out where everyone was sitting as there were no waiters/waitresses around to help us and we ended up dragging in extra benches and chairs from surrounding tables just to accommodate the group. The cosiness actually resulted in a whole cocktail being spilt on one poor girl!

Second of all it was clear that working out how to bill the table was going to be problem and so the solution was to split the table up into three billing “areas”. Of course this caused confusion for the waiters who couldn’t work out to which “area” drinks and dishes belonged. This also caused problems at the end when it came to paying and I’m sure as a result Ping Pong failed to charge a number of drinks to us (though having said that the meal still ended up being quite pricey – for me £18 got me a couple of iced teas and two dishes. Just as well Jenny and I had a late lunch today!)

Finally service tonight was generally slow. There was no organisation or control by the staff from the beginning and as a result all night getting orders in for drinks and food was slow. Actually getting our drinks and food was also slow.

Still, despite the disaster that was Ping Pong, we all had a good night though conversation, as usual, on such a long table was difficult. Afterwards a few of us rolled into The One Tun across the road where Mel and Rach caused a bit of havoc when they tried to ring the bar man’s bell … the less said the better eh? 🙂