The Art of the complaint (or, Adventures at Fifth Quarter)

I got a request for this article which was originally published in early 2007.
This is a late draft version so it's not perfect but I know several people enjoyed it.


The Art of the Complaint
Adventures at Fifth Quarter

It was a weekend evening and we were in the car trying to decide on dinner. I didn’t want to go to Southridge and deal with the crowds and the traffic. The Town Center presented many options but paying for parking and fighting crowds for the Basketball Tournament didn’t seem too enticing either.

After driving around Charleston for about twenty minutes we decided on The Fifth Quarter. In spite of being adjacent to The Civic Center, all the basketball people were instead streaming across the street to The Town Center and its trendier restaurant choices.

It’s prime location notwithstanding, The Fifth Quarter seems almost ignored by the great hoards of people who flock to the big box restaurants in the Southridge area. I rarely see the parking lot more than half full and I never hear anyone talking about going to The Fifth Quarter.

When I was growing up, there were two steakhouses in Charleston. Everyone had their prom at either “Steak and Ale” (long closed, MacCorkle Ave, across from Haddad Riverfront Park) or “The Fifth Quarter”.

Somewhat later, in my early twenties, The Fifth Quarter was locally famous for their “All you could eat Prime Rib and Crab Leg” specials. The place used to be packed to overflowing by people enjoying the great steaks and very famous salad bar (which was a cut above what everyone else was offering at the time)

I spent many an evening in The Fifth Quarter enjoying slab after slab of excellent, all you can eat, Prime Rib. A friend and I even once took a small portable television to our quiet table so we could watch a football game while stuffing ourselves with prime rib.

This restaurant was a downtown highlight and its quiet and private interior, including the dimly lit bar, have been witness of birth of more than a few local marriages (and divorces).

At some point in the 1990’s the restaurant closed. I don’t know the history, but I know that it must have fallen on some sort of hard times and one day it was gone.

The twist is that there was some kind of groundswell of support that led someone to re-open the restaurant. And that’s how we arrive at 2007. The restaurant has been open again for years and is apparently keeping enough customers happy to keep the lights on.

The old saying is that “you can never go home again” or basically that you shouldn’t try and re-live the great memories from your youth because you will nearly always end up disappointed. Unfortunately, this is how my visit to The Fifth Quarter played out.

We walked inside the restaurant and I was struck by how the interior looks exactly like it did twenty years ago. I remember standing in the exact same lobby and hallway in my tuxedo during my prom.

The rustic wood paneling that was so chic when I was a kid now sort of looks dated and cheap. I think the little podium that the greeter leans against is the exact same one that was there in 1987.

The host looked up from his doodling and I advised it was a party of two and that I wanted a booth. Yes, I requested a booth. I had already deduced that since the lobby looked the same, I figured the dining rooms were still the comfortable, very private, booths along the perimeter and standard tables and chairs throughout the center of the room. Well, I hate sitting in the middle of the room so I wanted a booth.

The host, more or less, ignored my request and seated us at a booth-table. It’s one of those half booths that I always assumed were to accommodate persons in wheelchairs. We were tucked in a far corner and I got to sit in a chair while my date was in a booth whose cushion was also a holdover from the 1980’s. She said that the lower cushion was in such a state of disrepair that she would have been more comfortable sitting on her own ankle.

As I grumbled about the host ignoring my request by escorting us past several unoccupied booths, I noted that the room was at, probably, 40% capacity. There was a large group, in excess of 15 people, who were seated by pulling several tables together. There were some couples and families around the room. The disturbing fellow seated less than 2 feet from our table was creepy. He was sitting alone at his table with empty food plates and was reading something. He seemed to react to our every conversation. The creepy fellow eventually left, but his attention to what we were discussing was just another level of disappointment and we had only been in the building for about 5 minutes.

A young man eventually came to our table and introduced himself as our waiter. My date requested a soft drink and I requested a Guinness on tap. He didn’t know if it was available on tap, but he would find out.

Five to ten minutes passed (he was taking orders at several tables around the room) before he returned with our drinks. Sadly, my Guinness was in a bottle and had been open so long that it was warm and flat. Yes, I am being picky, but anyone that serves Guinness needs to know the proper way to do it. The bartender had apparently opened this bottle but the waiter let it sit for a long time. It’s unacceptable, but I didn’t have the energy to complain. The waiter appeared to be tending to almost every table in the room and it looked like he had his hands full.

The menu was extensive. It’s pretty much standard steakhouse fare and was exactly what I expected. The menu has changed from my youth and there is certainly a wider selection of foods than I remember.

Appetizers from $7 to $15 bucks, soups, salads, pastas, chicken, steaks and ribs. It’s all pretty much the entrees and cuts of meat that you would expect. The prices are a step above most of the big franchise steak places.

One trick that I remember from prior visits, to jack up the price, is that the very inviting, and beautiful, salad bar is not included with the entrees. A house or Caesar salad is included, but if you want access to the bar, it’s an additional $2.49. With most entrees averaging $20, and some steaks nearing $30, I consider it somewhat insulting that one must cough up more money to use the salad bar.

I will say that the best steakhouses in big cities all operate this way. Everything is a la carte’ and you pay for each item on your plate. Vegetables are five to seven bucks more, a baked potato is another five to seven bucks. It is standard fare at expensive restaurants, but I just don’t think The Fifth Quarter is on that level. This place is competing with entry level quick dining restaurants and you simply get more for your dollar at other places.

I worked through my warm and flat Guinness and tried to reassure my date that in spite of her uncomfortable booth cushion she would have a good meal.

Our waiter was running around like mad. He was clearly overwhelmed and didn’t return to our table for quite a while. In fact, I watched him take the order from, and deliver bread, salads and drinks to a table that were seated after us. I may not have noticed these other people but they were sitting in one of the booths that our host walked past when seating us.

There appeared to only be one other waiter in the entire room. These two guys both had artful variations of facial hair and these two guys almost looked like twins. I could only tell them apart by their shirt color. There simply had to be some sort of wait staff problem on this evening as my recollections of The Fifth Quarter were always of a platoon of nicely dressed, and presented, professional type waitresses who were always everywhere you looked. In fact, some of my best memories of service are from The Fifth Quarter. They simply did an amazing job tending to their tables and you got the feeling they were doing their job as a career and not just something they do part time while in school.

These two guys were doing all they could do to tend to their tables, but it was failing miserably. We waited way too long to make our order, refills didn’t come until long after the glass was empty and it just got worse by the minute.

The waiter eventually arrived at our table and we got him to stand still long enough to take our order. For me, it was Prime Rib. For my date, Blackened Chicken Alfredo.

I told him that I wanted medium rare Prime Rib. Mind you, this is a place where I have had hundreds of cuts of Prime Rib. The menu even defines “Medium Rare” as red with warm center. They have never gotten my order wrong…...well, keep reading.

Soon, some bread came and since we didn’t get any appetizers, we each consumed some of this decent, but unremarkable, standard steakhouse bread.

I had selected the $2.49 salad bar on top of my $22.99 cut of Prime Rib. The salad bar is the exact configuration and probably the exact same pewter containers that I remember from the 1980’s. However, this bit of nostalgia is not a bad thing. Everything on the salad bar looked fresh and the bar was surgically clean and nothing was out of place. 45 minutes in and I finally find something to like.

I returned to the table to find my date eating her kitchen prepared salad that was included with her meal. After spying my amazing concoction from the bar, she was more than a bit annoyed with the, technically pretty, but otherwise bland and tasteless salad that she had to endure.

We finished our salads and were more than ready (and probably an hour in at this point) when the waiter arrived with our dinner.

You know that moment of thrill that comes when a waiter places a piping hot dish in front of you. That first instant of eye contact with some amazing looking food……well, neither of us experienced that on this evening.

Her Blackened Chicken Alfredo was a small bowl of pasta with a pale orange “sauce” and with some curious looking chicken on top. I say curious looking because it looked like airplane food. It was too “blackened”. It looked like those frozen, processed, chicken patties that you can buy in places that do not have an actual grill. The grill marks and blackened areas were just too perfect. It looked like prop food. This was not a high quality piece of chicken. From the looks and ultimately to the dry taste, it was not what she expected to receive.

Amazingly, the bland and processed chicken wasn’t the worst part of the dish. The alfredo sauce was a new low in restaurant sauces. This gelatinous mass was clearly not a real sauce. After a taste she instantly, and forcefully, stated that she was absolutely sure this was Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup. I tried it and, yes, I am sure she was correct. I have Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup all the time and I would bet money that this was the exact same stuff.

This was a $9.99 entrée and from what we could tell, it contained processed, surely frozen chicken, about 15 cents worth of pasta and a ninety-nine cent can of cheese soup. It was a complete representation, utterly inedible and she stopped almost immediately.

I was concurrently discovering one of the worst pieces of Prime Rib ever served. This grey colored slab of meat was cold to the touch, was utterly devoid of any form of moisture whatsoever. This piece of meat simply couldn’t have been cooked on this calendar date. Also on the plate was a pitiful ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes that were equally bad. I have had box-mix potatoes prepared in a college dorm room that tasted better than these.

I sat there, head in my hands, and wondered how this was possible. What was I supposed to do? Why did this restaurant burden me with this decision making process? All I wanted to do was come here, have a good meal and spend 50-70 bucks in the process. Now I have to determine how I am going to handle this mess.

How do I tell the waiter that, so far, with the exception of the salad bar, everything he has delivered is worse than dog food? Do I play good cop or bad cop? Hell, I even considered just walking out.

Luckily (sarcasm), I was able to stew over this decision for quite a while because the waiter took his sweet time to return to our table. Both of our drinks were long empty and our plates remained largely untouched.

Eventually we made eye contact and he came to the table looking like a puppy that just made a mess. I think he knew it wasn’t going to be a pleasurable exchange.

The cliff notes version is that I was a good cop. I was very polite, but I was firm. I told him that the pasta dish was unacceptable on all levels. I told him that my steak wasn’t anywhere near medium rare and that considering the complete absence of any red or pink coloring and the absolute lack of moisture in any capacity that it simply must have been sitting on a shelf somewhere for hours. I asked for the manager.

Three to five minutes passed before the manager made it to the table. I asked him if the alfredo sauce came from a Campbell’s soup can. He claimed it was their own special recipe. Impossible.

I showed him my, now rapidly decomposing steak. It was now such a disgusting shade of grey that it looked more like a prop from CSI Miami rather than anything resembling fresh, restaurant, Prime Rib.

The manager didn’t say much, but he did agree that my steak wasn’t medium rare. I told him that if it was a simple overcooked steak that it should still have some semblance of moisture. This was a well-traveled rib. It must have been left over from some earlier time. He had no explanation and probably didn’t appreciate my extensive description of disdain for the grey slab. It literally looked like a 1950’s black and white television show was playing on my plate. The steak sucked all color from the surrounding area and left everything a pale shade of grey. It was disgusting.

The manager was, of course, full of apologies and offered to take the food away.

My date decided to just get her meal from the salad bar and that was the extent of what she ate that evening. In short order, I was presented with a visually pleasing and perfectly cooked medium rare Prime Rib.

The new plate was garnished better but it also included an ice cream scoop of those still horrendous mashed potatoes.

So, there I was, stressed out, annoyed and generally in need of a nap, but I was working through my replacement Prime Rib. It was far from the best Prime Rib of my life, but it was a piece of meat that they can be comfortable in serving. I ate most of it and was ready to leave.

The waiter finally reappeared at our table and was happy to see that I finally ate something. He also apologized for the ordeal, but I didn’t think he needed to relate the contents of his conversation with his manager about our complaints. As the customer, I don’t care what he tells the manager and I don’t care if he thinks I am complaining about his service. For the record, I made no complaint about the service. I think he was overwhelmed with too many tables. Sure, he should have brought my Guinness beer on time, but I let that one go.

The waiter was trying to appease me, but I didn’t want to have the conversation. It was a bad experience and I was in no mood to relive it in conversation with him. It was also unsavory that he was telling me that he “went to bat for me” with the manager and he was sure they would take care of me with the check.

This wasn’t a new car purchase where the salesman is going to the manager begging for a good deal for the customer. Frankly, I didn’t care that he was “going to bat for me”. I hadn’t asked for any adjustment of the check and since it hadn’t yet been presented to me, I wasn’t thinking about it.

In the end, the check was only for my two beers. The manager evidently authorized the adjustment and didn’t charge us for any of the food. I would have paid the full menu price for everything. I appreciate that they took the food off the check, but it was truly the only right thing to do.

Even with the approx. $6 dollar dinner check, I still tipped the waiter a large amount which would equal a nice tip on the full check. I never stiff the wait staff. They work too hard to be punished for things that are outside of their control.

I was shocked at how the evening played out and I look forward to returning for another visit just to see how much better it can be.

I hope that some of you visit The Fifth Quarter. Let me know that they can still serve a great meal. Just don’t let them seat you at the half-booth, don’t order a complicated foreign beer and stay far away from the mashed potatoes.