Every time we ate and drank in a cafe or restaurant a 10% service charge was added to the bill. To me this is both a good and bad thing.
It's good because you don't have to worry about whether to tip or how much to tip.
It's bad because it increases the bill considerably and does the money go to the staff? Also it assumes that all service is equal which quite clearly it isn't. In some places service is very good and above what you might expect, but in others it is the opposite.
We have enjoyed a number of cruise holidays over the past 20 years. Gratuities were always left up to the passengers, although there was always a suggestion of how much should be given in tips. The problem with this is you tended to give to what I would call "high profile" staff. Your cabin steward, your waiter/waitress etc, whilst the "hidden" people like the kitchen staff would miss out.
Now the gratuities have been in large subsumed into the cost of the cruise with "gratuities included" being used as a marketing and selling tool. So now you pay for gratuities within your holiday bill and have no idea whether that part of the cost filters down to the staff. At times I have serious doubts that it does.
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The picture gallery today includes a few of Eastbourne on a very grey day. We walked across the Sussex Downs (why are they called downs when most of them seem to be ups)? It was a tough walk at times from Eastbourne to Jevington - a small village which is famous for one thing.
It is where Banoffee Pie was invented. For the uninitiated this is a sweet pudding that is a mixture of banana and toffee. It was invented in the 1970s by Nigel Mackenzie and Ian Dowding of the Hungry Monk Restaurant in Jevington and there is a plaque on the wall to indicate this.
The building is now a holiday let but the plaque remains as a reminder of its place in culinary history. The pie came about almost by accident. Nigel Mackenzie tried to follow an American recipe for Coffee Toffee Pie but felt there was something lacking. He experimented with a variety of fruit before eventually deciding that bananas gave the best flavour. If you want to know more about the history of the sweet just follow the link below.
https://www.sussexlive.co.uk/whats-on/hungry-monk-sussex-restaurant-banoffee-5014951
It's not the first time we have visited a town/village with a strong connection to a British dessert. A number of years ago we were in Cumbria and visited the quaint market town of Cartmel. It was in the village shop tea rooms that Sticky Toffee Pudding was invented.
Maybe sometime in the future we will try to find out where someone had the bright idea of putting custard over prunes or making a pudding out of bread and butter!!
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Comments were made yesterday that I actually appeared in one of the blog pictures. Well that's my anonymity destroyed, but the other threequarters demanded that I should be in one of the shots taken at Nyman's National Trust garden and house.