No Bottled Water for me, please

I don't subscribe to this. I think restaurants should serve tap water free of charge. Pushing expensive San Pellegrino or Evian or Vittel onto suspecting customers under the innocent query of "still or sparkling?" is just an odious way of earning large mark-ups for zero value-add.

Yesterday's Sunday Times had an article on restaurants that did not serve tap water, and they interviewed the managing director of an Italian restaurant who defended her position thus "Our patrons are serious diners and come for our food, not to taste water. It's the customer with a budget who insists on tap water." (quoted from Sunday Times).

Well, I can be sure that I would not ever patronise that particular restaurant. Precisely because I am at a restaurant to taste the food and not water, that's why I don't see why there's a need to drink carbon-unfriendly bottled water at ridiculous markups. None of the high-class restaurants in Singapore or overseas that I've eaten at - Les Amis, Iggy's, Jaan, Gunther's, Au Jardin just to name a few - have ever received my request for ordinary water with anything but warmth and grace. Needless to say, the restaurant in question does not fall into the above exalted company. Nuff said.