Lost in Translation

I love what customers have to say about our place...sometimes.

5 top strolls in last night, foreigners of some kind, my AGM being Polish can't recognize their accents at all. 1 orders a shrimp, the other 4 order our whole fish for the evening, the Red Snapper. Order goes out of the kitchen and it's a slow night so I happen to walk out front 15 minutes or so later to see my AGM speaking to them. A server approaches me and whispers that the table is complaining the whole fish is bad.

Cue "slap in the face" look...I have worked in many restaurants where food was over ordered at times and shit goes out before you can serve it. Shit happens, just don't let it happen twice, you know? I have yet to serve a "bad" item in this restaurant. We are slow enough right now to the point where I can order 80% of my fish every day and it's gone by the next. No exaggeration, we have 86 items all the time in the name of serving the freshest possible product.

So I head back to the kitchen waiting for the manager to come back and tell me WTF just happened. He had a smile on his face, and he went into it. 4 people had the whole fish, 2 of them had cleared the plate save for the bones, the other 2 were more then half done. The one leading the complaint was one of the people saying that it was bad and just didn't taste like Red Snapper (WTF do I gain by selling a fish under a different name? Do you know how inexpensive it is to buy a whole fish?). The other 2 who have finished more then half are silent and wont verbally complain to the manager. The guy leading all this then asks, "has this fish been frozen?"

Cue "kick in the balls" look...sorry buddy, I don't have a freezer to even put them in. After this question was asked, my AGM stated that we don't even have anything but a small freezer for ice cream, and he proceeded to give them menus because what else can you say to a guest that has already made up their mind? They also had a 4 course meal including the fish... hmmmm.

We ended up buying only one of them, they didn't even try to order anything else.