Silks rant


From: Staff with too much time on their hands To: Poor Head of Catering Subject: Silks Dear Jo, A group of us would like to provide some feedback on Silks based on discussions that we’ve had both amongst ourselves and with others since it opened on Monday morning. We believe you are the right person to contact, but it would be great if you could please forward this email, as appropriate, if not. Sandwiches / Deli Bar We’re really not happy with the fact it's no longer possible to order sandwiches / baguettes at the deli bar in person and have them made up according to our wishes (rather than these having to be ordered beforehand online). Popularity The system of being able to visit the deli bar and pick and choose what you wanted was an extremely popular service (both before Silks closed for refurbishment and at Bunhill Row over the last six months). The numbers of people who purchased ‘bespoke’ sandwiches from Bunhill Row, rather than visiting Pret/EAT/Boots etc for pre-made sandwiches attest to this fact. Convenience and Choice With the old-Silks, many people would always go down and either go straight to the deli bar with a specific choice of sandwich in mind, or check whether they wanted any hot food, and then use the deli-bar as a fall-back, in the knowledge that they would be able to purchase some food which they definitely would enjoy, having ‘made’ it themselves. The convenience that this provided, together with the opportunity to ensure you could leave Silks having eaten something you actually wanted to eat is now not possible. We will have to decide well in advance of lunch whether to go for a sandwich or not, so as to be able to order online during the morning. Choice of Sandwiches The choice of sandwiches now on offer isn’t great, given the far smaller size of them, and their price. Many of us could rely on a sandwich to keep us going for a long portion of the day (often working until after 8pm before having the opportunity to get another meal) but the new size of the sandwiches simply does not enable this. Why have they become smaller yet more expensive? Similarly, we do not understand how Silks, which is supposedly designed to provide the best service to those who wish to purchase food from there, is providing a better service by limiting the choice of sandwiches available to sandwiches that are pre-made, rather than permitting customers to have sandwiches made up which they actually want. Convenience (or lack of) The ability to order sandwiches in advance, online, is both innovative and commendable and we fully approve of this additional service. The problems lie, however, in the exclusive use of this system to the detriment of in-person ordering (for the reasons described above) and the limited availability of this service. As to the second point – limited availability – we think it worth highlighting the inconvenient times currently provided by Udeli. To be expected to be able to choose your sandwich before 10am neglects the fact that you don’t know (a) whether you will want a sandwich for lunch, and (b) what you want for a sandwich even if you do know that you want one. It similarly highlights a failure to appreciate the working environment of the thousands of people who work at Linklaters: we are often unable to take the time to log on to Udeli before 10am to choose what to eat. Work (meetings, client calls, urgent demands for documents) gets in the way of such things, and it is often far easier to spare 10 minutes at lunch time than it is to spare even a few minutes in the first hour or two of the morning to order a sandwich. To improve this we really feel that the online ability to order sandwiches needs to last through until lunch service, to provide the full convenience which this service could afford to staff. Queues and Costs Having spoken to numerous staff as to why a bespoke sandwich service is not available, we have been provided with two general reasons as to why the service may have been removed: (i) the fact that the popularity of the sandwich bar sometimes led to queues of people; and (ii) more product was being used in making bespoke sandwiches than pre-made sandwiches, so there was greater costs and wastage involved. Queues Queues were not bad with the old-Silks and, if anything, attested to the popularity of the sandwich counter. Given the short time it takes to make a sandwich, the queues would decrease within a short period of time. As stated above, people are generally happy to spend a few minutes at lunch waiting for a sandwich that they will enjoy, more so than trying to find a few minutes first thing in the morning to go about ordering online. The queues for the new salad bar and Prime Grill show that people are happy to be provided with the choice of queuing for food that they wish to eat, so we don’t believe this can be supported as a reason for removing a popular choice. Cost If there is greater wastage / product use in producing bespoke sandwiches rather than pre-made sandwiches, this should simply be passed on in the price of additional fillings, rather than through the removal of the service. However, on the assumption that people will not buy pre-made sandwiches that they do not want, surely there will be wastage (and associated costs) there? Price Prices appear to have increased substantially. As a few examples: Salad: the ‘basic’ salad bar used to cost approx £1.20 for a large plate, yet now costs £1.99 (66% mark-up), despite the ingredients being the same, albeit in a smaller range of choice. The speciality / chef’s salads have also increased substantially in price (they never cost the £3.55 now charged). Soup: A large bowl of soup used to cost approx 68p, yet it now costs £1.10 (62% mark-up). Hot main dishes: These have increased in price, often increasing from approx. £2.60 to £3.60 (before sides). Whilst the hot dishes still represent good value compared to eating out at a restaurant, to pay this much for lunch every day at work will soon lead to us all spending far more per month on food. We cannot understand how these increases in price can be justified, especially the large mark up on the soups, salads and sandwiches (the online ordering of sandwiches being vastly more expensive than both at old-Silks and Bunhill Row). Level of Subsidy The Silks Q&As (DocExp A11128771) provide assurances that the level of subsidy remains the same. Renovation costs A large budget was provided by the partnership for the renovation of Silks, so we do not believe this increase in costs is to cover any additional costs involved with this renovation. Ingredients We appreciate that for some dishes, more expensive ingredients may be being used (for example, the noodles on offer on Monday, and the fish pie on Tuesday). However, this cannot be the case with the soups (there’s only so much you can do with a soup!), and especially not with the basic salads. Labour costs A common observation is that there are incredible numbers of people wearing black shirts who do quite simply not a lot. To have one person stood by the trays to pick them up and hand them out to people is both extravagant and unnecessary during lunchtime. To find a person positioned in the same place at 4.30pm when one of us had a meeting over coffee in Silks on Tuesday was ridiculous, given that no one was requiring trays, let alone requiring someone to hand one to them. Just as costly is the provision of people throughout the day to welcome / greet / say goodbye to people as they enter / exit the Silks area (even when passing through to get between the Shire and Milton towers, rather than to purchase food). There were four people stood on ‘sentry duty’ during the coffee visit on Tuesday, and we have experienced such overkill both during breakfast and lunch service. To welcome people is nice, but arguably better suited to a restaurant rather than a staff canteen, and to employ so many people to do this throughout the day (including off-peak times) is extravagant, and surely very costly. Availability of side dishes and ‘greens’ Previously at Silks we would be able to purchase a main dish, and then whatever number of sides that we wished (vegetables, potatoes etc). It seems that the current set up does not permit this, and indeed provides much less opportunity to add 'greens' to our dishes - for example, no such option was available at Eat Street or Fired Up on either Monday or Tuesday. When ordering the fish pie from Fired Up on Tuesday, one of us wanted to have some greens with this dish. However, to get this we were informed that we would have to go over to the Comfortable section to get a simple dish of broccoli. To assume that people will only want greens with the dish from one ‘station’ seems rather misguided. When this was pointed out on Tuesday, we were told that we could order the broccoli at Fired Up and then simply collected from Comfortable. This has a number of problems: It is inconvenient to have to collect different bits of food from different stations when the stations are spaced so far from one another compared with the old Silks. To spend time queuing at different stations for different items of food, even having paid for them in one go (knowing that we won’t be able to jump a queue simply to grab a dish without ‘paying for it’ at that station) adds time, and means we don’t get to eat our food when it is hot. When I asked to pay for the broccoli at Fired Up, the server did not think you could do this and did not know how much to charge, as he only was serving one dish at that station. Staff need educating in this regard. No receipts are apparently provided at one station to prove to the other station that the greens have been paid for. The answer that ‘we trust people’ seems a complete fudge, and a poor solution. It isn’t that we don’t feel people can be trusted – indeed we hope they can – it is simply that we shouldn’t need to have to persuade the staff at Comfortable to hand over dishes without receiving payment. Can we please request that greens, and other sides, are available at more than just Comfortable. This helps avoid all of the above problems, seems sensible, and there is more than enough space to provide such selection at Fired Up and Eat Street. Heat of Food at Eat Street and Extent of Choice Generally Heat A number of us have chosen to eat at Eat Street each day this week, and on the invitation days last week. In general, the food from there has been only lukewarm when eaten (almost cold). Could this please be looked into? We understood the whole point of ‘seeing our food being cooked in front of us’ was so that it was piping hot and crafted for each diner. Whilst we had anticipated something along the lines of what exists at Citigroup’s and Lehman's cafeterias (a ‘pick your own’ noodle bar, where ingredients were chosen per person, then cooked in front of us, rather than the wholesale transfer of a large vat of noodles in sauce, as per Monday, from the back kitchen to the pot on display ready for dispensing from), this appears not to have been implemented. To get our dishes cooked more appropriate to the number of people ordering it (i.e. not serving dishes in advance of people ordering them, then going cold, as was especially true of the food on Wednesday) would be a good improvement and one which I’m sure people would be happy with. Extent of Choice With the old Silks, each food bar (‘European’, ‘Mediterranean’, ‘Asian’ etc) used to offer two choices of dish. Currently, only one dish is offered at each of Comfortable, Fired Up and Eat Street. This decrease in choice of hot meals is far from ideal (especially if you dislike some ingredients – such as fish, which many people do) and, if anything, increases our earlier point regarding the need for an available sandwich fall-back. Just as importantly, the choice of two hot desserts has decreased to one. This is quite restrictive, and arguably for a canteen of Silks’ size, a greater number of desserts should be provided as was the case with old-Silks. Further, there appears to be only one soup choice on offer, which begs the question as to whether we will only ever have the option of a vegetarian soup in order to cater for everyone’s requirements. Other observations / queries Whilst the four points above are what we, and others we have spoken to, feel most strongly about, there are numerous other observations which we would like to bring to your attention: Where the soups are served from, there is no means of displaying what type of soup is on offer, or what price it is. To learn of this, you need to walk around to the opposite corner of the Fired Up station to have a look at the electronic display there. Could there please be added some form of sign next to where the soups are as to what is being sold that day. It needn't be another plasma screen - I'm sure all would be happy with a chalk board. Could there also please be some more dispensing areas for condiments, more central and away from the food dispensing areas, just like there used to be with the sauces etc previously. Are there provisions for takeaway condiments such as salt, pepper etc as before? Additionally, whilst the wholegrain mustard is very tasty, the use of containers where one has to insert some form of cutlery to get to it is not at all hygienic (people are bound to insert used cutlery into it) and seems counter to the increased attempts of the cleaning services to reduce risks of flu and other illnesses spreading around the firm. There is a real bottleneck at the point at which salads are ordered, which greatly increases the wait time - perhaps the introduction of another server on a till would reduce this problem? Furthermore, there seems to be a disproportionate amount of staff not making sandwiches behind the sandwich counter, and a real lack of staff who are, in fact, making speciality salads - could some be moved across to compensate for the greater demand at the Salad bar? Many have commented on the size of the coffee cups - they are substantially smaller than they used to be, with no option to have a larger size. Is it possible for a variety of coffee cup sizes to be re-introduced? Is a fresh ‘made to order’ smoothie bar to be introduced at any point, as we had previously? Final thoughts We are sorry to sound very critical of the new Silks. Perhaps it’s the case that people will say what they dislike more than what they do like, but we did want to add that we feel the place looks great, and the staff are providing a very positive and welcoming atmosphere. The hot dishes which we have had have been delicious, and the chefs are evidently making some very nice food. From our perspective, however, it has become a bit more like a cuisine restaurant as opposed to a canteen from which to grab a quick and convenient meal, which was what made the old-Silks so popular. We appreciate that it’s only the first week, so we’re sure some things will be ironed out over time, such as the staffing of the different stations, but feel that some of the main points listed above may need a greater level of reconsideration. Some elements of old-Silks which made it so convenient, popular and effective as a canteen seem to have been lost, and we feel that this upset goes far being a inertia to change; indeed, it is more a case of ‘if it aint broke, don’t fix it’. We hope you find some of our comments constructive and helpful, and we would be grateful if you could provide us with any feedback on the above. Many thanks and kind regards, People With Too Much Time on Their Hands

From: Staff with too much time on their hands
To: Poor Head of Catering
Subject: Silks

Dear Jo,

A group of us would like to provide some feedback on Silks based on discussions that we’ve had both amongst ourselves and with others since it opened on Monday morning. We believe you are the right person to contact, but it would be great if you could please forward this email, as appropriate, if not.

Sandwiches / Deli Bar

We’re really not happy with the fact it's no longer possible to order sandwiches / baguettes at the deli bar in person and have them made up according to our wishes (rather than these having to be ordered beforehand online).

Popularity

The system of being able to visit the deli bar and pick and choose what you wanted was an extremely popular service (both before Silks closed for refurbishment and at Bunhill Row over the last six months). The numbers of people who purchased ‘bespoke’ sandwiches from Bunhill Row, rather than visiting Pret/EAT/Boots etc for pre-made sandwiches attest to this fact.

Convenience and Choice

With the old-Silks, many people would always go down and either go straight to the deli bar with a specific choice of sandwich in mind, or check whether they wanted any hot food, and then use the deli-bar as a fall-back, in the knowledge that they would be able to purchase some food which they definitely would enjoy, having ‘made’ it themselves.

The convenience that this provided, together with the opportunity to ensure you could leave Silks having eaten something you actually wanted to eat is now not possible. We will have to decide well in advance of lunch whether to go for a sandwich or not, so as to be able to order online during the morning.

Choice of Sandwiches

The choice of sandwiches now on offer isn’t great, given the far smaller size of them, and their price. Many of us could rely on a sandwich to keep us going for a long portion of the day (often working until after 8pm before having the opportunity to get another meal) but the new size of the sandwiches simply does not enable this. Why have they become smaller yet more expensive?

Similarly, we do not understand how Silks, which is supposedly designed to provide the best service to those who wish to purchase food from there, is providing a better service by limiting the choice of sandwiches available to sandwiches that are pre-made, rather than permitting customers to have sandwiches made up which they actually want.

Convenience (or lack of)

The ability to order sandwiches in advance, online, is both innovative and commendable and we fully approve of this additional service. The problems lie, however, in the exclusive use of this system to the detriment of in-person ordering (for the reasons described above) and the limited availability of this service.

As to the second point – limited availability – we think it worth highlighting the inconvenient times currently provided by Udeli. To be expected to be able to choose your sandwich before 10am neglects the fact that you don’t know (a) whether you will want a sandwich for lunch, and (b) what you want for a sandwich even if you do know that you want one. It similarly highlights a failure to appreciate the working environment of the thousands of people who work at Linklaters: we are often unable to take the time to log on to Udeli before 10am to choose what to eat. Work (meetings, client calls, urgent demands for documents) gets in the way of such things, and it is often far easier to spare 10 minutes at lunch time than it is to spare even a few minutes in the first hour or two of the morning to order a sandwich. To improve this we really feel that the online ability to order sandwiches needs to last through until lunch service, to provide the full convenience which this service could afford to staff.

Queues and Costs

Having spoken to numerous staff as to why a bespoke sandwich service is not available, we have been provided with two general reasons as to why the service may have been removed: (i) the fact that the popularity of the sandwich bar sometimes led to queues of people; and (ii) more product was being used in making bespoke sandwiches than pre-made sandwiches, so there was greater costs and wastage involved.

Queues

Queues were not bad with the old-Silks and, if anything, attested to the popularity of the sandwich counter. Given the short time it takes to make a sandwich, the queues would decrease within a short period of time. As stated above, people are generally happy to spend a few minutes at lunch waiting for a sandwich that they will enjoy, more so than trying to find a few minutes first thing in the morning to go about ordering online. The queues for the new salad bar and Prime Grill show that people are happy to be provided with the choice of queuing for food that they wish to eat, so we don’t believe this can be supported as a reason for removing a popular choice.

Cost

If there is greater wastage / product use in producing bespoke sandwiches rather than pre-made sandwiches, this should simply be passed on in the price of additional fillings, rather than through the removal of the service. However, on the assumption that people will not buy pre-made sandwiches that they do not want, surely there will be wastage (and associated costs) there?

Price

Prices appear to have increased substantially. As a few examples:

Salad: the ‘basic’ salad bar used to cost approx £1.20 for a large plate, yet now costs £1.99 (66% mark-up), despite the ingredients being the same, albeit in a smaller range of choice. The speciality / chef’s salads have also increased substantially in price (they never cost the £3.55 now charged).
Soup: A large bowl of soup used to cost approx 68p, yet it now costs £1.10 (62% mark-up).
Hot main dishes: These have increased in price, often increasing from approx. £2.60 to £3.60 (before sides). Whilst the hot dishes still represent good value compared to eating out at a restaurant, to pay this much for lunch every day at work will soon lead to us all spending far more per month on food.
We cannot understand how these increases in price can be justified, especially the large mark up on the soups, salads and sandwiches (the online ordering of sandwiches being vastly more expensive than both at old-Silks and Bunhill Row).

Level of Subsidy

The Silks Q&As (DocExp A11128771) provide assurances that the level of subsidy remains the same.

Renovation costs

A large budget was provided by the partnership for the renovation of Silks, so we do not believe this increase in costs is to cover any additional costs involved with this renovation.

Ingredients

We appreciate that for some dishes, more expensive ingredients may be being used (for example, the noodles on offer on Monday, and the fish pie on Tuesday). However, this cannot be the case with the soups (there’s only so much you can do with a soup!), and especially not with the basic salads.

Labour costs

A common observation is that there are incredible numbers of people wearing black shirts who do quite simply not a lot. To have one person stood by the trays to pick them up and hand them out to people is both extravagant and unnecessary during lunchtime. To find a person positioned in the same place at 4.30pm when one of us had a meeting over coffee in Silks on Tuesday was ridiculous, given that no one was requiring trays, let alone requiring someone to hand one to them.

Just as costly is the provision of people throughout the day to welcome / greet / say goodbye to people as they enter / exit the Silks area (even when passing through to get between the Shire and Milton towers, rather than to purchase food). There were four people stood on ‘sentry duty’ during the coffee visit on Tuesday, and we have experienced such overkill both during breakfast and lunch service. To welcome people is nice, but arguably better suited to a restaurant rather than a staff canteen, and to employ so many people to do this throughout the day (including off-peak times) is extravagant, and surely very costly.

Availability of side dishes and ‘greens’
Previously at Silks we would be able to purchase a main dish, and then whatever number of sides that we wished (vegetables, potatoes etc). It seems that the current set up does not permit this, and indeed provides much less opportunity to add 'greens' to our dishes - for example, no such option was available at Eat Street or Fired Up on either Monday or Tuesday.

When ordering the fish pie from Fired Up on Tuesday, one of us wanted to have some greens with this dish. However, to get this we were informed that we would have to go over to the Comfortable section to get a simple dish of broccoli. To assume that people will only want greens with the dish from one ‘station’ seems rather misguided. When this was pointed out on Tuesday, we were told that we could order the broccoli at Fired Up and then simply collected from Comfortable. This has a number of problems:

It is inconvenient to have to collect different bits of food from different stations when the stations are spaced so far from one another compared with the old Silks. To spend time queuing at different stations for different items of food, even having paid for them in one go (knowing that we won’t be able to jump a queue simply to grab a dish without ‘paying for it’ at that
station) adds time, and means we don’t get to eat our food when it is hot.
When I asked to pay for the broccoli at Fired Up, the server did not think you could do this and did not know how much to charge, as he only was serving one dish at that station. Staff need educating in this regard.
No receipts are apparently provided at one station to prove to the other station that the greens have been paid for. The answer that ‘we trust people’ seems a complete fudge, and a poor solution. It isn’t that we don’t feel people can be trusted – indeed we hope they can – it is simply that we shouldn’t need to have to persuade the staff at Comfortable to hand over dishes without receiving payment.
Can we please request that greens, and other sides, are available at more than just Comfortable. This helps avoid all of the above problems, seems sensible, and there is more than enough space to provide such selection at Fired Up and Eat Street.

Heat of Food at Eat Street and Extent of Choice Generally Heat

A number of us have chosen to eat at Eat Street each day this week, and on the invitation days last week. In general, the food from there has been only lukewarm when eaten (almost cold). Could this please be looked into? We understood the whole point of ‘seeing our food being cooked in front of us’
was so that it was piping hot and crafted for each diner. Whilst we had anticipated something along the lines of what exists at Citigroup’s and Lehman's cafeterias (a ‘pick your own’ noodle bar, where ingredients were chosen per person, then cooked in front of us, rather than the wholesale transfer of a large vat of noodles in sauce, as per Monday, from the back kitchen to the pot on display ready for dispensing from), this appears not to have been implemented. To get our dishes cooked more appropriate to the number of people ordering it (i.e. not serving dishes in advance of people ordering them, then going cold, as was especially true of the food on
Wednesday) would be a good improvement and one which I’m sure people would be happy with.

Extent of Choice

With the old Silks, each food bar (‘European’, ‘Mediterranean’, ‘Asian’ etc) used to offer two choices of dish. Currently, only one dish is offered at each of Comfortable, Fired Up and Eat Street. This decrease in choice of hot meals is far from ideal (especially if you dislike some ingredients – such as fish, which many people do) and, if anything, increases our earlier point regarding the need for an available sandwich fall-back.

Just as importantly, the choice of two hot desserts has decreased to one.
This is quite restrictive, and arguably for a canteen of Silks’ size, a greater number of desserts should be provided as was the case with old-Silks. Further, there appears to be only one soup choice on offer, which begs the question as to whether we will only ever have the option of a vegetarian soup in order to cater for everyone’s requirements.

Other observations / queries

Whilst the four points above are what we, and others we have spoken to, feel most strongly about, there are numerous other observations which we would like to bring to your attention:

Where the soups are served from, there is no means of displaying what type of soup is on offer, or what price it is. To learn of this, you need to walk around to the opposite corner of the Fired Up station to have a look at the electronic display there. Could there please be added some form of sign next to where the soups are as to what is being sold that day. It needn't be another plasma screen - I'm sure all would be happy with a chalk board.

Could there also please be some more dispensing areas for condiments, more central and away from the food dispensing areas, just like there used to be with the sauces etc previously. Are there provisions for takeaway condiments such as salt, pepper etc as before? Additionally, whilst the wholegrain mustard is very tasty, the use of containers where one has to insert some form of cutlery to get to it is not at all hygienic (people are bound to insert used cutlery into it) and seems counter to the increased attempts of the cleaning services to reduce risks of flu and other illnesses spreading around the firm.
There is a real bottleneck at the point at which salads are ordered, which greatly increases the wait time - perhaps the introduction of another server on a till would reduce this problem? Furthermore, there seems to be a disproportionate amount of staff not making sandwiches behind the sandwich counter, and a real lack of staff who are, in fact, making speciality salads
- could some be moved across to compensate for the greater demand at the Salad bar?

Many have commented on the size of the coffee cups - they are substantially smaller than they used to be, with no option to have a larger size. Is it possible for a variety of coffee cup sizes to be re-introduced?

Is a fresh ‘made to order’ smoothie bar to be introduced at any point, as we had previously?

Final thoughts

We are sorry to sound very critical of the new Silks. Perhaps it’s the case that people will say what they dislike more than what they do like, but we did want to add that we feel the place looks great, and the staff are providing a very positive and welcoming atmosphere. The hot dishes which we have had have been delicious, and the chefs are evidently making some very nice food.

From our perspective, however, it has become a bit more like a cuisine
restaurant as opposed to a canteen from which to grab a quick and convenient meal, which was what made the old-Silks so popular. We appreciate that it’s only the first week, so we’re sure some things will be ironed out over time, such as the staffing of the different stations, but feel that some of the main points listed above may need a greater level of reconsideration. Some elements of old-Silks which made it so convenient, popular and effective as a canteen seem to have been lost, and we feel that this upset goes far being a inertia to change; indeed, it is more a case of ‘if it aint broke, don’t fix it’.

We hope you find some of our comments constructive and helpful, and we would be grateful if you could provide us with any feedback on the above.

Many thanks and kind regards,

People With Too Much Time on Their Hands

Tip Off ROF