Posted by Glenn Messick on January 30, 1999 at 11:02:38:
I was just recently entered a pissing contest with a friend of mine over who has had the most outrageous customer complaints. I had an incident this past summer that I will never forget if live to be 125. Our menu changes each summer ( it is a seasonal a la carte fine dining place on the New Jersey shore) and one of the veal plates on last year's menu was veal tenderloin medallions with a sautee of wild mushrooms in a port wine glace, topped with jumbo lump crab. At approximatley 9:30 one saturday night ( why do these things invariably happen during the busiest hour the entire week?) a waitress comes into the kitchen and tells me a man at one of her tables returned his veal because it was not medallions. I assured her that the meat on the plate was indeed a medallion cut from a veal tenderloin, and if the guy still wanted no part of it, to let him take his pick of anything else off the menu.She came back a minute later, with the plate, and told me the guy who complained was a salesman for a meat purveyor,so he knew what he was talking about,and that he was adamant that what the chef (read:I) was serving was not veal medallions. At this point the owner went out to talk to the man, and she returned, saying basically the same thing. I told her that we were 100% in the right, and that she should'nt comp that table a damn thing. I would fully understand if it were some sort of mistake on the part of the kitchen, or if the waitress had served the man the wrong dish, if that were the case, I would have paid the check myself, but it was absolutely out of our hands, and if the guy was truly working for a meat purveyor he should quit and get a job making Slurpees at 7-11 because he was an uninformed ignoramus.The owner explained the fact she would "give away the house" if she thought we were at fault, but in this instance we were'nt. Eventually the guy ate something else, and paid the check without further incident. The next day this imbecile calls the restaurant and asks me what I was paying for my meats, across the board. My usual first question to meat purveyors is a quote on chicken necks and backs,(I have to buy my stock bones, because we use boneless skinless breasts for our chicken entrees) because it throws them off, and I can get a good feel for the practices of the company from how much they try to rape you on what is essentially trash. If the neck prices are rediculous,its apparent that they are trying to wring every last cent out of each purchase, so I likely won't deal with them. I then asked him how he enjoyed his veal. He started on a sermon about pinned and pounded cutlets that truly had to be heard to be believed. This moron was essentially saying that to be called a medallion, a meat had to be pounded flat. I kindly told him that the term medallion denotes nothing more than a cross sectional slice from a cylindrical piece of meat, and nothing more. What he was talking about was a pinned and pounded cutlet, scallopine, escallope, whatever you wanted to call it, but NOT a medallion. I then told him to have his supervisor call me, so I could debate the subject with him, upon which he hung up the phone, and I went back to my prep work. Was I wrong? To my knowledge, a medallion is exactly what the name implies, round coin-shaped, slice of any meat, maybe formed with cheese cloth, but never beaten senseless or jaccarded into oblivion like you would for cafeteria style veal parmegiana ( what I like to call "fur burgers" for their apparent lack of identifiable meat) I'd like to hear any thoughts or stories you folks have about this rather humorous matter.Cheers