Sat, 6 Mar 2010
Bar Opiume has terrible service. Do not go there.
I don’t normally do this i.e. criticise things/people/places in public spaces, so you can guess how pissed off I must be in order to make a post about this.
My friends and I had actually planned to head to Five Izakaya Bar for drinks, but we took a detour to have a very late dinner.
Unfortunately, we hadn’t taken into account the Bar’s early closing time, so we headed to the next nearest dig, which was Bar Opiume.
I will never go back there again, and I hope you don’t either, because that place is the dumps.
First, we had to wait for someone to ask us if we wanted a table. Then we had to wait for menus which never came.
You might think I’m being unreasonable here, but:
- when your entire table has been seated by a somewhat reluctant server (which is stupid – you’ve got a table that wants to spend its money), and
- the table has been waiting for menus for five minutes, and to top it off,
- the table has been glaring at a bunch of bartenders and servers who are looking right back at the table and laughing and joking about god knows what,
this is a bar that must be brought down. Why?
Because it not only has bad service, it has bad service to good customers like myself:
I was once a waiter and now I’m a customer. I go out to eat … and I have boatloads of sympathy for servers and tip generously. But the reason the staff … pissed us off was because we acted like perfectly reasonable customers and they still treated us like shit. If we had been demanding and pushy I could understand, but we weren’t.
– Waiter Rant, Vive La France
Remember, ladies and gentlemen: avoid Bar Opiume like the plague.

I perfectly understand the rant of Rant.
On the flip side, I also understand how waiters & bartenders feel, and so treat them in the way I will want to be treated by my customers – with a smile. A rare thing in Singapore nowadays, if I may so add.
Have you wrote in to the management or inform the captain before you leave? They should at least know so such bad service does not get repeated.
Cheers mate.
It’s been a long while since we’ve last caught up too.
Nope – perhaps I should have.
Will arrange drinks at my place when work slows down a bit for me