terrible experience. below is the email i sent to black olive management after my terrible 40th b-day experience two weeks ago. my hope was that they'd take this opportunity to keep me as a customer. my email went without a response so i have therefore posted my account so that you can avoid the grief we had to endure:
"dear (manager),
last saturday, i dined at black olive and had a truly poor experience. my hope is that by sharing these events with you, as opposed to posting them online publicly, black olive management will see it fit to do right by my family.
let me start by saying that my wife and i dined at black olive once before, in september of 2011 to celebrate our 7th anniversary. the experience was sensational. not only did we find the food to be outstanding (i particularly enjoyed the octopus appetizer), but the attention and care that we received from our server was superlative. never before had i been invited to view the fish on ice prior to placing my order. furthermore, for my wife who is vegan, the extensive menu offered many meat and dairy-free options. there was an array of vegetables that she enjoyed, including a wonderful mushroom appetizer. and the kitchen was flexible and accommodating to ensure that every dish was something she could eat. for this and many other reasons, my wife and i ranked that meal as one of our best ever in baltimore.
so last month, when my aunt and uncle offered to take me and my wife (along with my parents) anywhere in baltimore to celebrate my 40th birthday, i chose the black olive. we arrived for our 8:00 pm reservations with the highest of expectations.
things went sour almost immediately. for starters, it was not until we arrived that the hostess informed us that this was “restaurant week,” and therefore we could only order from a drastically reduced menu. i could not believe that when my father made reservations on the phone, no one thought it appropriate to inform him that this was restaurant week. to me, that already felt like an egregious oversight. in the past, when i’ve gone out during restaurant week, the establishment would typically offer a rw menu at a reduced price, along with the regular menu at normal prices. but this was not the case. our only option was the rw menu on saturday night. we were then ushered to the very back of your backyard patio terrace and promptly forgotten about (apparently, my dad also requested that we not be placed in the back room).
already, the experience was so counter to what i was expecting that it really put me in a bad mood. the octopus that i wanted ... not available. the mushrooms my wife wanted ... not available. the dining choices ... minimal (you were already out of several rw options as well!). every attempt that we made to find alternatives to the pre fixe menu were thwarted by our server who simply said, “i apologize, but it’s restaurant week and we don’t have any of that in our kitchen.”
the service that made our first visit so special was non-existent! i arrived expecting to get a tour of the fish on ice, and instead found myself simply hoping that our servers would remember we were in the restaurant. on multiple occasions, we had to literally stand up to find a server. we didn’t receive our appetizer course for over 75 minutes after sitting down.
there were so many little things that compounded an already bad situation that it’s hard for me to outline them all here. as an example, ... after telling both my aunt and mother (who are both vegetarian), that there were no vegetables in the kitchen (other than the salad), the server told my vegan wife that they would make here a beet salad (not sure why they’d do that for her and not the other two women). then, over an hour later when the entrees arrived, they brought my wife steamed zucchini and said “we apologize” but we ran out of beets. a) if no beets were even on the pre fixe menu, how does the kitchen promise something and then run out of it when they’re not even serving it? b) why did they not inform her of the switch at some point over that hour? it turns out that my wife hates zucchini.
truly i could go on and on, but i think i made my point. never before has the gap between what i expected and the reality of the situation been so wide. and i think this is why i was so upset by the evening. i was looking forward to celebrating my 40th birthday with an amazing culinary experience while being pampered in a fine restaurant. suffice it to say, that is not what any of us received. to your credit, one of your senior servers apologized to our table and comped us our wine (4 glasses), but it felt like too little too late.
in summary, saturday’s experience morphed the black olive from my favorite restaurant in baltimore to one that i would be remiss to recommend to anyone moving forward. that’s a shame for me and for you. my hope is that you will see this note as your opportunity to win us back as patrons, and to prove to us that last week was an anomaly."
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as i already stated, i received zero response from them. as i told them in a follow up email this morning, "the poor quality of service that i experienced at the restaurant was unfortunate (and i suspect circumstantial). the poor level of follow-up and your inability to address this situation responsibly is downright egregious and inexcusable."
i guess that is all i have to say about the black olive :-(