Wild Ginger Seattle serves spoiled crab meat, and doesn’t *seem* to care
This is a great business lesson *and* a great restaurant story all wrapped into one post.
First, I’m not usually the type to want to take a beef public. I believe that one should praise in public, criticize in private. However, Wild Ginger (a relatively expensive restaurant located in downtown Seattle) makes it impossible to send anything more than a few words at a time to them. Their “contact us” form rejects submission of comments that are too long and (even worse) gives the user no indication of why the form failed to submit.
So, because Wild Ginger’s comment form is broken, I must make the comment in public and LINK to it in their comment form. Isn’t that brilliant? I bet that that’s exactly the side-effect they didn’t have in mind when they told their web designer to limit comments to 150 characters (or whatever the limit is).
Here’s the text of the complaint I tried to submit:
I was having lunch with business associates at Wild Ginger (downtown Seattle) today and noticed that the crab cakes that we ordered as appetizers smelled strongly of ammonia. At first, I misidentified the source of the odor as the dipping sauce that came with the crab cakes (because the sauce did indeed smell of ammonia), so the server took away one of the two dipping sauces at our table and returned 20 minutes later to inform me that they had determined that the sauce wasn’t spoiled. By the time the server returned, I had rediagnosed the source of the odor as coming from the crab cakes themselves. I pointed this out to the server, and he took away one of the three crab cakes on the table (not the two remaining dishes of crab cakes, mind you, which would have been the appropriate response, even if the customer was just imagining the whole issue).
The server returned 5 to 10 minutes later to say that the crab cakes were indeed “off” and that he’d be removing the crab cakes from our bill. I expected Wild Ginger to make a better response than “We’ll take those off your bill.” Wild Ginger was serving spoiled crab! The restaurant should have assured me that they’d be taking the rotten crab cakes OFF THE MENU.
Subsequent to the meal, I did some research online and learned that ammonia in crab is a common symptom of spoiled crab meat. There is ample documentation of this issue online, but here are a couple of particularly enlightening links:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/346785
http://www.ari1.com/id41.htm
Serving spoiled crab is not something I would have expected of Wild Ginger. I have been to the restaurant at this point a dozen times since I came to Seattle in 2006 and have always considered it a safe place for a business lunch. Now that I’ve been served spoiled seafood at Wild Ginger, and now that I’ve experienced an underwhelming response to the issue, I am questioning whether it is safe to order *anything* from the menu. Perhaps refrigeration standards are not up to par. Perhaps other hygiene issues exist. I know I may be overreacting because one bad experience in a dozen doesn’t necessarily mak a restaurant bad (especially after so many positive experiences), but I was particularly concerned that the waiter didn’t react more appropriately to the issue. At the very least, the waiter should have removed all of the spoiled food from the table immediately. He took away one single crab cake, not the whole lot. Second, I would have expected escalation to a shift manager who could apologize for the issue. Finally, I’d also expect not to see the crab continue to be served on other diners’ tables.
PS: Please fix your web comment form.