My wife and I had to move tables at a Quezon City branch of a popular Singaporean restaurant chain because small cockroaches were coming out from behind the wall cladding.
Not the huge flying kind, thankfully. But still: cockroaches.
We first sat beside the wall, which turned out to be a bad idea. The roaches seemed to be nesting behind the decorative wall panels, occasionally making their little surprise appearances near our table. So we moved.
The next table wasn’t much better. They appeared to be in more than one area.
I brought it up to two different staff members.
The lady at the counter listened intently, smiled politely, and then went back to what she was doing as if I had just commented on the weather.
The man in the kitchen at least gave a useful answer after I returned my food tray. He told us the mall admin already knew about the pest issue and that treatment was scheduled for the following week. Management, he said, was aware and on top of it.
That was good to know, I suppose. But it also made the situation feel stranger.
If management and mall admin already knew there was a pest issue serious enough to require treatment, why was the restaurant still operating as if nothing was wrong?
In a properly run food establishment, this should have been treated as an urgent health issue, not something customers had to sit beside until next week’s scheduled pest control.
I get that pests can happen, especially in food establishments inside busy malls. What I don’t understand is the calmness around it. Not alarm. Not urgency. Just the quiet confidence of people waiting for “next week” while customers are eating beside the problem today.
Maybe that is what bothered me most. Not just the cockroaches. But the casual way the situation was handled.