Skip to main content

The Paradox of Togo's (Norwich)

Since we met, my wife and I have been having lunch at Togo's on the rare occasions that we're in the city at lunch time. I really don't know why we keep going back there. Although the food is very good, especially the cheese cake, the prices are unreasonably high, the service is poor, the couple running the White Lion Street branch are obnoxious and the sign dictating the rules for the upper seating area, including no picnicking, respect and no unaccompanied minors, is less than inviting if not arrogant, rude and hostile. It makes me wonder if they've twigged that they're there for the benefit of the customers, rather than the other way around. Maybe that's why it's rarely full and there''s always a spare table.

I imagine we'll keep going.

Comments

  1. not any more.. just Googled 'Togo's Norwich' for info on why it's closed and found your Blog. Must say I agree with all your comments but still a shame typical quirky Norwich... but it got a bit too big for it's boots with the store expansion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jasper, it should have been so good! The food, the vision and focus on buying local were all excellent. The problem was the customer service was polarised and often extreme – either extremely unhelpful or extremely helpful with the latter failing to cancel the occasional shock and impact of the former. The attitude of the towards staff and sometimes customers could (at times) be obtuse, and more than a little embarrassing .

    ReplyDelete
  3. They have gone for good:

    http://new.edp24.co.uk/search/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=News&itemid=NOED05%20Jan%202009%2008:23:47:100&tBrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=search

    ReplyDelete
  4. Really, since Togos originally opened, Norwich has seen better coffee shops open... try Olive's on Elm Hill (my vote for Norwich's best)or Franks Bar on Bedford Street

    ReplyDelete
  5. Really, since Togos originally opened, Norwich has seen better coffee shops open... try Olive's on Elm Hill (my vote for Norwich's best)or Franks Bar on Bedford Street

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hey Paul, we're having a discussion about this. Is it pronounced to-go's or tow-go's ?

    Hopefully you can settle this.

    Regards,
    Frankie.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...