Chef Fred's

"Joe –

I wanted to write to share with your readers the absolutely atrocious dining experience my family and I had last night at Chef Fred’s. Let me say first that my parents, myself and my husband eat at Chef Fred’s on a regular basis. We have always enjoyed the fact that we could get a quality meal in a relaxing atmosphere with good service. It’s somewhere we could go to “dine” as opposed to just “eat”. I’ve kept up with all of the recent drama being reported at Chef Fred’s [stabbing, fights, etc] but looked at them as isolated instances, until now. It’s now that I see Chef Fred’s caters to that crowd.

So, last night, after church, my parents, aunt, husband, infant son and I went to Chef Fred’s for dinner. We were looking forward to being able to sit down and relax with a good meal and good conversation. That did not happen. We arrived at Chef Fred’s at 7:30 and were seated in the dining area of the restaurant. There was a large party of approximately 25 people, 2 tables of 4 people and 2 tables of 2 also in the dining area. 15 minutes after being seated, our server still had not made an appearance. My father finally asked the hostess to please send our server to our table so that we could order drinks. [I don’t think that our server even knew or realized up until then that she had another table to wait on. From what I could tell, our waitress had one other table in the entire restaurant]. We got our drinks 20 minutes after we ordered them. An hour after we first entered Chef Fred’s, we finally got our salads and appetizer. 30 minutes later, our plates had been cleared for some time, but we still had no entrees.

At this point, all of us were feeling extremely frustrated with the service we had received. My father asked to speak to the manager [Brenda], who had stayed pretty well unseen most of the night. My father spoke to her about the poor service and stated that it appeared that the restaurant was understaffed. The manager proceeded to argue with my father, that “no, the restaurant is not understaffed”. She said she would find out what was going on and would be back. Back into the kitchen she went and our entrees came out soon after that. My father told our server that he had spoken to the manager about the length of wait for drinks, appetizers and our meal. Our server replied that our meals had taken so long because my father wanted his burger well done. How a well done burger can cause a meal to take an hour to prepare is beyond me. When we finally got our food, it had been 2 hours since we had first entered Chef Fred’s. My aunt and father’s burgers both tasted like they had been previously cooked then re-warmed. My husband was given the wrong fish entree. Disappointingly, the manager never appeared in the dining area again to follow up on our previous concerns. [She helped deliver our entrees to us, brought us some ketchup and was gone].

Then, as we’re finally eating our dinner, I saw the entire atmosphere of the restaurant begin to change. Even though we were in the dining area, people began milling and mingling about the area. People were walking and standing right beside our table, talking loudly and sipping their drinks as the bar crowd took over the entire place. Bouncers started patrolling, dressed like swat team members; two of which posted at the door with metal detectors. Nobody at our table was even able to have a conversation because it was so loud and congested all around us. It felt like diners were being stampeded out of the once peaceful dining area. We scarfed down our meals and got out of there after paying the full bill of $120.

So, thinking about the horrible experience we had, it occurred to me that no one really even apologized for any of the many problems we experienced. No one cared about the poor service, food and atmosphere. And why? Sadly, I feel that Chef Fred’s doesn’t care about the old, boring customer who just wants a nice meal. They want the flashy party crowd that’s going to throw dollar after dollar away on liquor. So it’s no major loss to them if we leave thinking “I’m never going back there again”. They would rather cater to the very people that are, at least in this case, driving their loyal customers away. It looks like Chef Fred’s is content to become another bar in Salisbury where the police are called to once or twice every Saturday night for fights, stabbings, etc. and the restaurant will continue to place blame everywhere but where it is deserved. We will now being taking our business to other restaurants where quality and customer service is top priority."