Food Recession at Robert Oliver Seafood

On Sunday night I had the pleasure of going to listen to David Sedaris speak in Baltimore. I don't know what it is about him, but he can really make me laugh. Something about his whiney voice, his ridiculous stories, and his penchant to make fun of North Carolina...he really gets me going.

On Sunday, though, the humor really started before we even made it to his show. You see, my parents, my sister, my husband and I all were going to go out to dinner. Without the kids. What's so funny about that, you ask? Well nothing. That is unless you "eat" at Robert Oliver's Seafood Restaurant.

I have never, ever, ever, had such an unbelieveable experience at a restaurant. When we first got there, the rather surly host mumbled something...in hindsight it was probably "you don't want to eat here ladies, this place is s*^t." But we rolled our eyes, followed him after he huffed and puffed at us, and we sat down behind a mosquito net away from all the other diners. It wasn't perfect, but trying to keep our spirits up my husband and I kept repeating "it doesn't matter for us, we're so happy to be out we would be happy at chic-fil-a."

But at least at chic-fil-a, there is chicken. The very first thing that our waiter said to us was.
"good evening, I just want you to know that there is no calamari, no cobb salad, no chicken breast, no cesaer salad, and no fish."

My sister, who was STARVING, had already staked her claim in the calamari and cobb salad...you can imagine the dissapointment.

We forge ahead and try to order some wine. The waiter's response, "I'll have to check if we have that" Super, you do that.

Good news, they do! But they only have 2 bottles, so as he opens the first bottle, the server slams down the second and last bottle right on to the table. Not that we weren't going to have another, but it seemed a little aggressive to say the least.

If you have gotten attached to out waiter in this story, don't, because that is the last we saw of him.

My family is nothing if not content with a good drink and good company, so it took us a while to realize that the waiter hadn't brought us our hummus platter. When we checked our watches, 45 minutes had passed. Hummus with pita chips...not that hard to prepare, not necessary to cook, and after all, I could have walked to the Whole Foods and prepared it for us in half the time.

Our waiter, at this point, had all but vanished. I saw him fly by our table a few times, wiping his brow from all that non-food serving, non-order taking, and non-responding to his tables he was doing...tough job. Eventually. my father got up to see if he could attract some attention to us, to get some help, from someone, anyone who would acknowledge our presence. Like getting tickets to a U2 concert, he should have gotten there early.

As he stood up and headed to the bar and he all but heard, "back of the line buddy." This was the first time that we looked up from our immaculate, untouched table with not even a crumb from a piece of bread (we asked, they said they were out), and saw that there was a line of about 8 people all wondering/demanding where their drinks/food/waiter were. It was not a good scene. We then pulled back our mosquito netting and saw that none of the other customers had food on their tables, few had drinks, and all had scowls on their faces.

We knew then that we were a little lucky because we had not one, but two bottles of wine. When my father returned to the table, all he had was a corkscrew in hand...something seen as a small victory for our family as we could now get that second bottle of wine open. But he also returned with the knowledge that there was no food in the whole restaurant. Hmmm...something of a predicament when you are trying to go out to eat.

Resigned to not eating, buzzed from drinking on an empty stomach, and a bit giddy from the whole debacle it was time to head out to see David Sedaris.

Not to be outdone by the rest of the restaurant, as we hit the restrooms on our way out we found the ultimate outage...toilet paper.

There wasn't even toilet paper in this piece of s^*t restaurant.