I had a graduation party with my family (6 months after I actually finished uni and 2 months after I had my graduation ceremony but hey ho). We all went to chaudhrys buffet restaurant in Edmonton (London) for lunch. It was a big deal for my family (paternal side) because I was the first to graduate out of all my cousins, my parents, uncles and aunts never went to uni so everyone was really excited for me when I graduated.
Restaurant review
Before I show you what I wore I just wanted to do a quick review for the restaurant (which I will e-mail to them). I booked the restaurant beforehand (1 week before) and paid a £50 deposit, I had been there before with a few friends so knew that it wasn't too bad and looked really nice. It's actually a good restaurant, the food is nice (not amazing quality but nice none the less), it's reasonably priced (although it keeps going up) and the decor is really nice, however I wasn't happy with everything.
They charge a lot for drinks (£5 for a jug of cola, which would be less than £2 at the shops), we asked for tap water and by law they were supposed to provide tap water but they told us 'it wasn't their policy', I'd like to see how they can explain how this law doesn't apply to them.
Their waiters were really pervy and this is very shocking for a halal HMC approved restaurant, we were sat with our large family away from the main buffet and when my cousin went to get food one of the waiters made a comment in his strong Asian accent, when she replied 'excuse me?!' he repeated what he said, she walked away in shock and didn't feel comfortable walking back to the buffet to get more food, when my uncle saw the men staring at another one of my cousins as she got her food, he hurried her along. For the professional look of the restaurant we did not expect to receive this kind of behaviour from the staff, which made my female guests feel very uncomfortable.
On their website they have written 'We have provided for an on site car park for our guests to use in order to provide extra convenience. This is also a bonus if you wish to hold your event or private function with us; as then you would have sole use of this facility.' however when I called up they said that they don't have a private car park and there is a council car park that we can use. The council car park is always very busy as it's right outside a private tutoring school and mosque. When we got to the venue and my mum wanted to park the car she did see a private car park and the man at the gate said 'there were no spaces available'. So do they have a car park or not? Again, for a place that prides itself on providing for Muslims (i.e. being halal, on Islam channel etc) I found their dishonesty to be completely unislamic.
Maybe I'm nit picking now but we were told the reason why their prices had gone up was because they had introduced dishes such as steak....was there any steak on the day? No.
I had paid for all of my guests at the beginning but as we were leaving the man at the front desk said that apparently we had 2 extra guests (children) that we did not pay for....I found this highly insulting as he was accusing me of lying, we counted the number of guests again in front of him trying to see if we had made a mistake (if we had, I would have been more than happy to pay), but the fact was we didn't make any mistakes, but again he insisted that he and his staff had counted 2 more children in our party, in the end he said it was ok and let us go but the point is all of this put a downer on the entire day. I hope the restaurant take these points into account in order to improve their service because I would hate to see such a nice restaurant lose business due to things that can be easily changed.
If you would like to check out the restaurant follow this link http://www.chaudhrysrestaurant.com/buffet.htm
OOTD
I got lots of really nice gifts thanks to all my aunts, uncles and cousins. At the end my uncles gave a really nice 'speech' about the importance of education and how proud they are of me, so I'm really glad I stuck through the course and made it through uni, my little cousins made poems and cards and also gave mini speeches to say congratulations and how seeing me get through uni has motivated and inspired them. I was really touched by all the efforts everyone went to (=
So yeah 3 years of 'torture' was well worth it to see the happiness on my family's faces alhamdulillah.