This is not a review of Les Deux Salons. For my recent lunch at that French brasserie near Covent Garden I was focussed on two objectives: Getting my fingers on its burger for BurgerMonday consideration and breaking bread, though not in the literal sense, with Paul Winch-Furness, the food photographer who took the above image of my doing the former.

Neither is this a review of Les Deux Salons’ Scottish beef cheeseburger. No juice oozed from that too-lean patty when I pressed my fingers into the bun, nor did excitement spill into my mouth when I sunk my teeth into it. It was serviceable and cooked as ordered, but hardly worthy of further consideration, by me or by you.

My concern here relates to the croutons Les Deux Salons served to accompany its Mediterranean fish soup. Croutons are one of three accessories presented alongside most traditional soupe de poisson. The diner dabs the croutons to his or her taste with rouille (chilli-spiced aïoli), tops them with finely shredded Gruyère and lays them on the surface of the hot soup. Les Deux Salons’ croutons possessed the thin, elegant form of a Chanel model, but they were too long to fit horizontally within the diameter of their white porcelain soup bowl. You couldn’t float these rafts in the soup any more than you could a battleship in a bathtub without compromising the structural integrity of the vessel.

Could the oversize soup crouton situation have escaped the attention of the French servers? Surely they observed frustrated diners like me fumbling with the croutons before breaking these slender beauties into shards, leaving crumbs all over the table for them to clean up. Regardless, it’s unlikely anyone brought this to the attention of head chef Craig Johnson and executive chef Anthony Demetre with the urgency required to necessitate a course correction.

I asked my French waiter if the croutons looked too big to him. He dutifully replied that they were as the chef designed them and that the diner was expected to break the croutons. Really, I thought? I’ve lived in Marseille and wrote a book about its cuisine: Never was any restaurant diner expected to break a soup crouton. It occurred to me that Les Deux Salons might have a communication problem that is often a consequence of top-down management in business, government and the military. I broached the subject with organizational psychologist Jo Jordan. In response she posted the  7 Reasons Why Your Employees Won’t Tell You Bad News on her blog.