WAKKIS Indian Restaurant - Strongly Worded Letter

AkanmuAbuja@gmail.com

Rating: 5/10

February, 2013

Wakkis – Indian Restaurant

171 Aminu Kano Crescent.

Wuse 2, Abuja, Nigeria

Please see the bottom of this letter in the Highlights/Review section, as well as the bold sentences for the brief version of this letter/review.

Letter to Wakkis Management

Dear Wakkis Management,

This is a strongly worded letter to express my opinions following my experience at your establishment. I should inform you that this letter is being made available to the public through the internet, primarily for the purpose of empowering or entertaining other consumers curious about your establishment.

10 Things I Love/Hate/Indian Inconclusive Head Nod-Shake about Wakkis

1.     Premier and Easily Found Doesn’t Mean Awesome

I won’t pretend as if Wakkis isn’t arguably Abuja’s premier Indian restaurant. Too bad being a premier choice doesn’t mean that it’s the right choice. I mean I Google search Indian food in Abuja and get a splurge of responses about Wakkis. I ask friends if they know where I can get Indian food in Abuja, and they all say I should try Wakkis. I check Wakkis website and I see an extensive list of Indian food that I have been craving for months, not to mention the fact that the website had clearly been significantly worked on, giving me the illusion that great effort could and should lead to success. So, I decide to visit Wakkis and…insert Indian head nod and simultaneous head shake here.

2.     There’s a Place and Time for Grilling: Not Inside Wakkis Please

The first thing I noticed in your restaurant was the grill. There’s a grill smack in the middle of the ground floor of the restaurant where some chefs actively make food while customers dine. In theory, watching chefs cook the food you are about to eat adds a visceral component to dining. In this case though, the only thing visceral about the grill is that the primitive feeling of being choked in a house/compound where dinner has been cooked is inescapable. Unfortunately, unlike the smell of village firewood cooking, the grill at Wakkis only makes a customer feel choked and not excited for what’s to come.

3.     Smoke Rises

Although my friends and I had found a dining spot that was great in terms of placement and seclusion, we decided to get seats upstairs in order to avoid sitting close to the smoke. Big mistake. Smoke rises and so sitting upstairs at Wakkis is a big mistake unless a customer wants to smell like they camped out overnight under the table of a suya seller (there must be a better word for a professional suya seller, like ‘suyarista’…I’ll keep working on that one). As half of your seating is on the second floor of the restaurant, having that grill indoors was a huge mistake and I needed to emphasize it with a second section.

4.     Poor Service is Insulting, Even When Uneventful

The service at Wakkis is poor and waiters are slow to respond, not to mention that the appetizers we ordered literally never arrived so that when we ate our food an hour and a half after we arrived at the restaurant, we were hungry and didn’t see the point in reminding our waiter that he had failed to bring the appetizers we ordered.

Some things are just easier said than dramatized, especially since the waiters didn’t do anything individually appalling…just a slew of poor things. For example, I won’t get dramatic about the fact that a waiter didn’t approach us with menus until we had been seating for about 15 minutes. I won’t whine about how following our receipt of menus, we still needed to ask a waiter to come and take our order after a long amount of time had passed after we first received the menu. I’ll just say that those things are examples of how poor service at your restaurant is and how you certainly need to make some changes.

5.     Depth

The menu has a very wide range of dishes on it.

6.     Quantity

Each order comes with a lot of food and most menu items have a choice of one out of three side items including Naan, rice, and French fries.

7.     Presentation

It is nice the way the dishes are delivered along with the sides on separate platters. The delivery approach works well because of the size of the tables in the restaurant.

8.     Still not Sure Why Homely Means Ugly

There’s something about this place that makes it a great place for different types of groups. It isn’t fancy, yet it isn’t bland; it isn’t pretentious, yet it isn’t unimpressive; and best of all, the overall set-up makes you feel like the journey to find the excluded (from most other interesting restaurant and businesses) Wuse 2  location was worthwhile. Wakkis is a well-furnished restaurant with nice wooden family-style tables that mostly seat groups of 4 but can also seat up to 8 together. It just seems like a wholesome and practical (except for the hot boxing that the grill forces customers to endure) place you can go to on any random day or on any special day (although I wouldn’t recommend that people spend their special days here…just calling it like I see it).

9.     You Don’t Mess With the Classics

When curry chicken and tandoori chicken do not taste authentic, there’s a problem. It isn’t even just that the tandoori chicken did not taste authentic, it was also very dry. However, I will admit that apart from the bad chicken tandoori, the other items on the menu are nice to eat…not great though. In short, the food is not great or good enough to justify the 3,000 to 3,500 Naira average per customer.

10.  Bad<Wakkis<Nothing Special

Refer to topic of this section.

(Note how I resisted the temptation to end with the words “and most of all, I hate how much I love your restaurant”)

  

Please feel free to contact AkanmuAbuja@gmail.com if you represent Wakkis and would like to respond.

Warm Regards

Akanmu

Highlights/Review

1.     This is a strongly worded letter because my experience at Wakkis was poor.

2.     Don’t make plans to go to other places after Wakkis because you’ll smell like you danced in barbecue smoke…but not in the yummy way…more like in the ‘Indian food breath is never sexy’ way.

3.     Service here is poor.

4.     The food is not great. Okay, I lied…the food is not good (great is a stretch). Not that it’s bad. It’s just not good. Perfectly mediocre is the right way to describe it.

5.     The décor is nice and apart from the smoky air, it is a really nice place to dine.

6.     The pricing is good considering it is Indian food in a well-furnished building located in sub-Saharan Africa. However, considering the mediocrity of the food, 3,000-3,500 naira per dinning guest is too much.

7.     You can find good directions on the restaurant’s website.

8.     The dish sizes are good.

9.     This is a nice place for groups of 4-8.