Thursday, June 07, 2007

The Slug Course

For our fourth anniversary, we decided to do a very Matt and Laura thing and go out for dinner (of course). We chose a restaurant in our neighborhood that has a very good reputation among the foodie community, that we hadn't been to yet because it can be a little pricey. Like many high-end restaurants in DC, they pride themselves on using local, in-season and organic products.

Our first course consisted, of course, of salad. I enjoyed a salmon seviche (that's the way that they spelled it, so that's how I'm going to spell it) with greens, and Matt had rabbit with romaine. As we were finishing up our salads, I saw Matt stop and look very intently at his plate. He kept staring at it, and I could tell he was getting very, very ansy. I glanced over at his plate, and saw a teeny tiny little slug squirming on the very last piece of lettuce. It was horrifying, but at the same time kind of amusing. The slug, if that's what it was, kept moving around, clearly terrified. Matt looked completely distraught. He flagged the waiter over (who was very, very good), and said, "There seems to be an animal on my plate, and it seems to be alive," while the slug kept squirming. The waiter was properly mortified, apologized, and whisked the plate away. He came back a few minutes late, apologized again, and said the manager was coming over to speak to us. The manager came a few minutes later, apologized profusely, and offered us a complimentary glass of champagne to give us a few extra minutes to decide if we wanted to continue our dinner. We decided that we wanted to stay, and enjoyed the rest of the meal. We support organics, after all.

All in all, the salad was comped, as well as our bottle of wine, and two glasses of champagne each. All of this without throwing a hissy fit in a nice restaurant, like some people would do. We'll probably go back, but probably won't order salad again. Supposedly, they also have the best burger in town.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good show! I've found that you get better comps and service when you are a bit understanding. Save the hissy fits for when they don't offer anything in return.

What restaurant by the way?

Laura said...

I'd rather not say the restaurant, simply because I thought they handled the situation really well. All in all though, we're kind of hesitant to go back.

There was a question on Tom Sietsema's online chat about a diner who found a hair in their food and lost their appetite. I was thinking to myself, what a wuss! Sounds to me that the restaurant didn't really handle it very well, though.