24th febbraio 2010

"All I need to know about Planet Italia I learned from the lunch queue"

Lots and lots to report but one thing in particular has been on my mind and I repeat it goes a little like this:

All I have learned, all I know, all I need to know about Planet Italia, I have learned in the lunch queue.

It really does encapsulate everything about Italian life so far. It starts at the stage of picking up a tray. There is an area where you collect a tray, a little piece of paper to go on the tray (everything in Planet Italia, has to have at least one piece of paper, preferably signed in triplicate), some bread (quite a variety - most hard, some oily, never brown, never seeded), a glass, and some cutlery, before moving through to the main area to collect your food.

Now then - this tray collection area, vestibule, call it what you will, clearly has two areas so you could easily have two or more people collecting their stuff at one time, but it is so badly arranged that it is impossible to have more than one person doing this at a time, and generally you have about 5 people trying to get things and getting in each other's way. Lean manufacturing or six sigma this is not.

Going through to the counters, there are is a pasta or rice bar, a salad bar, a meat and vegetable bar, a pudding bar, a serviette, oil, balsamic vinegar, paprika bar and a fruit bar. It is a mayhem arrangement of people milling around, getting in each other's way. And the staff at the counters are massively outnumbered by the other staff milling around, or outside smoking, so that progress is very slow.

Then there is the pay desk, sandwiched between the serviette et al bar and the fruit bar. Again, impossible to get to to scan your card to charge the incomprehensible amount of 1 Euro from your wages, without getting in the way of the fruities, or the oilers.

Further down is the seating area. With beautiful stunning views.

And then there are the two tray return areas, which again are excessively complicated, and ends up with people bumping into each other.

After dinner, there is a standing coffee bar. Italians don't sit down to drink coffee, but have very short very strong coffees, and huddle around standing tables for a couple of minutes and then scoot off. Of course, this coffee area does overlap into the original queueing zone, which makes things more messy.

The whole is located in the beautiful Villa Gori, a beautiful 18th century, former hotel.

So - how to sum all this up?

Planet Italia is an incredibly beautiful place, the food is excellent, the people incredibly friendly, but there is a variety of frustratingly dumb roadblocks to get in your way, obstructive beaurocracy. However, simply the best is that Italians ALWAYS find time to take lunch, are very social and incredibly friendly. Very different and really very welcome. In fact, if you don't go to lunch it is seen as very strange or almost rude. I like the approach a lot.