Unworthy Customers

In Santa Fe you constantly see examples of the old customer adage "you never know who is going to be an important customer, so treat everyone like the most important one." OK, maybe it's not an old adage, maybe I just made it up, but it's a good one. Anyway, in Santa Fe when you go into an art gallery, the people running it are almost unfailingly nice. Even if you are in your jeans and hiking boots and you just want to chat about art you already own and how you are downsizing and actually selling the art you already own, they will show you stuff, tell you tales, make you feel like a customer.

Now, when we decided to visit Santa Fe we knew we would go to art galleries and wander through enjoying some, shaking our heads over other stuff. And we knew we wouldn't buy anything. But we knew we would be customers of a few dining and drinking establishments.

Restaurants occasionally fall into a mode where some customers are more equal than others. Why I don't know. Every customer is spending money. I guess they figure if you are a regular or a restaurant critic, it matters more how your experience goes. There aren't any consequences, in other words, of giving you a lousy table or otherwise spoiling your experience if they don't know (or care) who you are. You already showed up and they will just charge you the prices on the menu. No loss.

Well, I guess the restaurant folks may be right. But since I started this blog, I figure there are consequences. My three or four readers will find out how I was treated at and what I think about these restaurants.

Everyone we asked about Santa Fe said Geronimo was the fine dining choice. So I made a reservation a long time ago, many weeks ago, for the night of the first full day we'd be in Santa Fe. A Monday.

Things started fine. While we were having delicious NMex food at Tomasita's for lunch someone named 'Ronni' (I'm guessing the spelling, it was a woman) called on my cell phone to get assurance that we would show up for our reservations. I assured her that we would. I thought this was a good sign. In retrospect, though, I think it meant that they were trying to give away our reservation to someone 'more important.' Maybe not.

We arrived a couple of minutes early. We immediately noticed a fireplace in front with tables set in front of it. Since indoor areas seem stuffy there anyway we hoped not to get one of those. We should have been so lucky.

FFP thinks the hostess said she 'had us at table 40.' Table forty was back a room and set for four (we'd only had a reservation for two for sixty days or so after all) and it turns out that four would be very very uncomfortable at this table. Shoehorned by a gas log fireplace, it had a banquette and two chairs on the opposite side of a narrow, not-intended-for dining (legs on outside) table. The hostess suggested that we both sit on the banquette. I wasn't interested in being by the fire and, as it turned out, two people could not sit on one side of the table very easily because to avoid the legs I had to move the extra chair well out of the way. My chair was apparently partly broken because as I squeezed in and scooted away from the leg that banged my knee the seat back and seat moved apart and gave me a mega blood blister on a finger.

So was this the worst table in the restaurant? No, it was the worst table in all of New Mexico. Because just to my right was a corridor and every waiter going to the kitchen with dirty dishes or coming from the kitchen with plates and every customer coming and going to the toilet had to pass through this corridor. I started doing a scientific stufy (well, maybe not scientific) of the average time we were left in peace without interruption. The longest was 30 seconds. Sometimes there was no break. Usually I'd count five, six, seven seconds and someone would go into or out of the corridor.

Now we should have asked for another table. But we didn't. So I can't tell you if they would have accommodated us.

But I will say they were serving the foie gras on chocolate cake. I'll go a lot of places with a good chef. But I won't go there. So I had a tuna and smoked salmon appetizer which was just okay. When I ordered the lobster and salmon entree I should have known that something was going to be off. The waiter said, "Now the lobster is spicy and it's served atop a cold salad." I guess other diners complained? Well, I got it anyway. The spice was cranked up a bit but that was fine. Overall it just didn't come together. The lobster and salmon were not mated in a meaningful way. The whole thing was served on a narrow curving dish that meant that my food was hard to keep on the plate. I hate that. FFP got some dish that combined fish with short ribs. You know when you go someplace like that with a chef, it has to work! We ordered a $20 retail bottle of Chardonnay for which they charged eighty bucks.

Did we have dessert and coffee. Um, no.

We retrieved our car and went back to the hotel. We asked ourselves if there were consequences for the restaurant. Probably not, we decided. But it wouldn't keep me from expressing my dissatisfaction in this space.

We did find places we liked in Santa Fe. The much-touted Cafe Pasqual's was everything we dreamed of. Fresh, flavorful, friendly service. Yes, it was crowded. But all tables were equal and you could actually dine at them without being assaulted by the service for every single table. We liked it so much that went back the second time for breakfast. The smoked trout hash and the motulenos were delicious. FFP had a breakfast chile relleno, too, that he loved. We tried to go back for dinner but were thwarted by the line. (They do take reservations.) We also enjoyed Il Piatto, too, where the pumpkin ravioli, apparently a signature dish, was wonderful. Service was friendly and they didn't have any table that was really so bad that it could be compared to number 40 at Geronimo.

Every customer's experience has consequences. We didn't try SantaCaFe on this visit because Austin's food critic for the local paper went there three times and had three bad experiences.

We love dining. And sometimes good experiences are expected and not realized. Other times good experiences are just stumbled on.