Room 101 (part five)

Hard butter in Restaurants

Why? It's nice to be given a little bread roll or slice of bread when we sit down to a meal but why are we so often presented with a little dish of butter that has all the spreadability of alabaster? I mean why? Is it hard to provide spreadable butter? Is there so little space in the kitchen that you can't spare one tiny corner of the worksurfaces to put the stuff to let it soften? Why do I have to scrape away at the damn stuff as if I'm scratching a particularly awkward label off a present only to have it bugger up the bread and make it to that horrible mashing up thing when I try in vain to make it spread. If this phenomenon were limited to those mid-range but yet slightly shit restaurants I'd understand but it's not. Sure in a Little Chef or a naff pub you expect to get those odd little parcels of a close approximation to butter (even these rubbish places sometimes manage to get these butter-envelopes soft) but at a decent restaurant? No. Shouldn't happen. This is intolerable in a decent place. You're probably gonna pay a lot of money so why should you suffer the indignity of hard butter. It's even more galling when the bread you've been given is all fancy and rustic and delicious looking.
In the past I judged a restaurant's standard of care by whether or not they pestered you by asking if everything was okay, but now I've switched to the butter thing.