THIS PLACE SUCKS....

(my experience at the Houston Heights Restaurant Field and Tides)

Abstract

Below is a long post. I rant, ramble, and use alliteration without care for who is reading or their time restraints. With that in mind, the basics are that this restaurant disregarded a reservation, common decency, and other manners under the guise of "thats our policy." May as well be "We were just following orders." They treated my wife, myself, and our guests rudely, and dismissed a group of 8 who has a reservation a week in advance at 8pm on a Saturday night. Their management was rigid and unpleasant, and I don't recommend anyone go to this place. I can provide recommendatons for better food (at equivaelnt or better pricing) and will be happy to do so just to discourage people from going here).

The Story...

Background

If you are familiar with Houston, particularly the heights area, you may have heard of a relatively new restaurant in the Heights called Field and Tides. This little experiment in pretentious dining was opened by Travis Lenig, who must have decided to try his hand at taking the hospitality portion out of the hospitality industry.

My wife and I are now acutely aware that at Field and Tides, being hospitable to customers is not only disregarded, but scorned enthusiastically. This poor excuse for a restaurant Is better described as a persnickety outpost for overpriced poultry and pesce, pardon the alliteration.

Typically, I’m a believer that any publicity is good publicity, but in this case, because I laid awake in the evening of my wife’s birthday with stomach problems and perhaps the worst taste in my mount I’ve ever encountered, from any restaurant, food-truck, pop-up, pot-luck, you name-it, I decided to write about it anyway.

In short, we were treated rudely, our reserved table for eight was given away on a Saturday Night, at 8pm, and the staff at the restaurant was just miserable.

Since this restaurant has opened, my wife’s family, my family, our friends, and relatives, have come to adore dining in the heights area, and we enjoyed the food at F&T well enough to not mind paying the premium that comes with eating at small local businesses. Eating local is a keystone of our decision making when it comes to dining out.

When one removes the human aspect of human interaction or the customer aspect of customer service, then your restaurant becomes a prison with a fancy menu. It is absolutely not worth supporting a restaurant that treats people in this way. We will not be going there again.

Please, don’t let my scathing attitude be the judge, let me just describe the situation, and decide for yourself.

What actualy happened (in a pseudo-screenplay style)

About a week prior to my wife’s upcoming birthday, I called Field and Tides and organized a reservation for eight people on a Saturday night at eight pm. The restaurant obliged and sent an email to confirm. Within this email, were the below, asterisked notes.

**We ask that the completed party be present before we take you to your table. Your party will not be sat until it is fully complete and arrived.

**We hold your reservation for 15 minutes after the reservation is booked to be seated.

***If the completed party is not present, the reservation is considered cancelled and we will accommodate those present by putting them on our walk in wait list.

So, the night of, six out of eight of our party have arrived by 8 pm, but we receive word from two of our part that their plane was slightly delayed and they would be running just a bit late (as it turns out, they arrived at 8:24pm). As I walked in, I approached the host-stand and quickly explained the situation. For the record, the below is paraphrased for both myself and the customer-disservice staff at this miserable establishment

Bobby:

“Hi, I’m Bobby, I have a reservation tonight for eight at eight, but we’ve had a bit of snag. Two of our partiy’s plane was delayed and they may not be here within the 15 minute window you advised. They are on their way, but it looks like they may arrive closer to 8:30. Can you seat us or give us a bit of extra time as we have the majority of the party here?”

Hostess:

Hi Bobby, Let me get a manager for you, we’ll figure something out.
Bobby steps out on to the patio to greet everyone who showed up for his wife’s party and we all wait for the manager.
Manager (“Jensen”) comes over shortly thereafter.

Jensen:

“Hi, Bobby? Nice to meet you, I’m Jensen. We have a very strict policy on seating full parties only, and we did send you an email to confirm you understood this policy. I’m afraid we cannot seat you and we will have to give your table away if your party is not here by 8:15.

Hi Jensen, nice to meet you too. Listen, you certainly did send that email, and I understand the policy, but this is obviously a unique circumstance. We have a relatively large party, and I thought perhaps you could have a some flexibility given this is a party of eight, its Saturday at eight, I made the reservation days ago, and we have the majority of the party here. Isn’t there something you can do? Surely you can understand this type of situation.

Oh yes of course, unfortunately though, this is our policy and we did inform you on the email. We don’t make any exceptions on this policy. You did confirm that you received the email that said you understood. I can put you and your party on the walk-in list and we can try and seat you when your whole party arrives.

Jensen, yes, I understand, and I know that is your policy, but we are a party of eight. We both know that if you give our table up we will not only be stuck waiting for over an hour, we cannot even go anywhere else and manage to sit down, let alone eat before 9. Its my wfe’s birthday, my sister in law is pregnant and hungry, and the two missing from our party are on their way. Can you please help me out here?

Well, we sent you that email, and we are trying to run a business here. We have held your table all day, and we have many other full parties that have been waiting for quite a while. We will be giving your….

B: (interrupting Jensen)

I’m sorry, but why would you hold the table all day? The reservation was for 8pm? Did all of those people call 5 days in advance and request a table too? I understand this is the policy, but really, no exceptions even in this type of circumstance?

No, but we did send you the email explaining our policy and we don’t make exceptions. Very sorry but we’re giving your table away

A few servers start breaking the table of eight down that was clearly our table.

Wow. I am shocked. I understand your policy, but if you’re running a business that is trying to make money, then you should realize that your complete lack of flexibility here is absurd. You understand how absurd this is surely? Are you really going to do this?

This is why we sent that email to confirm. We can sit you on our patio, would that work?

_Everything outside is wet and there are storm-clouds rolling in, while Jensen points to uncovered picnic tables in front of the restaurant. Its about 50 degress outside and getting cooler, and we are expecting rain. _

Yes. I GOT THE EMAIL. GREAT JOB and you are doing exactly as your email promised. Really good work following through on your threats. We won’t make the mistake of thinking you are people again. Given the weather, the patio will not work. I am truly in shock here, can you just let us order the extra plates or set a minimum on our tab. Surely there is some agreement we can make that will let us keep our table.

I’m sorry, no.

Bobby steps outside and explains the situation to his wife and the rest of the party. Everyone looks shocked, dismayed, flabbergasted, and baffled. Then emotions move from disbelief to anger and disgust.

The outcome

We discussed options, and decided to leave as no one could stomach giving a dime of money or another minute of time to such a pretentious, parsimonious, pitiful establishment that disregards people and exchanges being polite and considerate of the human condition for a strict adherence to policy and procedure, and a robot named Jensen that has a default setting of ‘But we sent you an email, and you confirmed you received the email.” This place is a poor excuse for anything. This was easily the worst experience I have had at a restaurant.

This restaurant did what they said they were going to do. They were not polite about it, and in fact, I would say Jensen treated me with a disgustingly persnickety and passive aggressive attitude that I would normally reserve for robot voices on the end of an answering service. A toddler with a button down could have handled this situation with more class, and had a better outcome than this so-called ‘manager’.

We knew the policy, we go the email, but what they need disclaimers for is how this policy is enforced with a rigidity only paralleled by the Secret Service. If Mr. Lenig believes that this rigidity is needed to effectively “run a business”, in the hospitality industry, then perhaps he ought to operate a mortuary. At least then his staff’s attitude would commensurate with his patrons.

Observing this type of policy with a rigidity that results in a complete disregard for human decency and customer service is something we should expect from high stakes security operations. This is not what a patron should receive when visiting a restaurant for an evening out. I was surprised, disgusted, appalled, disappointed, and furious at how this restaurant and its staff handled this situation.

If you go this far, thanks for reading. Please don't go to this restaurant. For your sake.

UPDATE.

(About 3 hours after the initial post on Yelp and Facebook.)

Bobby:

WOW! Pleased to give this update. It turns out Field & Tides is ardently monitoring their social media hits! Thank you Field & Tides for posting the below response to my review! I think your writing below does far more to demonstrate my point than anything I could have written. I stand in admiration of your impressive ability to make me laugh about this horrid experience.

Response pasted below from Yelp.

Chico R.
Comment from Chico R. of Field & Tides
Business Owner
1/22/2018 Bobby:

We encourage our diners to review our restaurant via social media. The hope and the expectation is for an accurate and honest account of the dining experience. Yet, here again inside of a week, I am having to write a rebuttal for the actual events that took place.

We are a family owned restaurant that seats 54 diners inside. We are a small restaurant. You are correct, we do have a reservation policy. We take reservations of six or more diners up to parties of 14. We also have a policy of holding those table reservations for up to 15 minutes after the reservation time before giving them away and only seating fully complete parties.

Why do we do this? We do this because we have limited seating and want to be fair to those diners that are walk-in parties and who patiently wait for a table on a busy Saturday night. We also do this because an incomplete party represents increasing table service times exponentially which is also unfair to other diners. Just imagine if I held tables for everyone that had “unique” circumstances. On a busy night, I might end up with a 1/4 full dining room and many, many angry patrons waiting. But, why should that concern you? It doesn’t affect your life on a daily basis does it?

Now, if there were no warning of these policies at all, I could completely understand your frustration. But, we not only explain verbally when reservations are made, but also via email as well as day of phone confirmation. That’s three separate levels of confirmation that your reservation is made and that we have explained our policies.

On the night in question, your reservation was for 8pm. Originally, the reservation was for 10 guests, which then became 8 guests. At 8 pm, your entire party had not yet arrived. At 8:15, the general manager told you that we could not seat you unless the entire party was present. He did this professionally, with common decency and very mannerful. You see this happens on a very regular basis. The lack of common courtesy actually falls on those who disregard time of arrival. I’m sure in your own occupation, if you had a business meeting and half of the meeting participants arrived 30-45 minutes late, it would create issues for you. Maybe I’m wrong.

As a matter of fact, he held the table until 8:25, fully 25 minutes after the reservation. Even after this, he tried to accommodate you with patio seating.

Now I’m sure your perception of the events will not change after reading this. You only see how your life was affected. That’s ok. I have no delusions that I’m going to change your mind.

The things that you wrote in your blog about my business partner and his “pretentious dining” and leaving “the hospitality portion out of the hospitality industry” were personal attacks that were completely uncalled for. Further, your comment that “being hospitable to customers is not only disregarded, but scorned enthusiastically” is as far from the truth as could be and quite frankly, completely dramatic.

I doubt any of this will make a difference in the grand scale of this thing called life, but it’s important to us that the truth be told. We work our tails off every day to make as many people happy as we can. We don’t always succeed, but do our best to learn from it when we do fail. Because we do fail. We are far from perfect. But the difference between what we do and what you wrote, is that we don’t stop trying to be better. And we never will.

Best of luck with your “blog”. I’m sure your “thousands” of readers will appreciate your accounting of the events, truth be told or not. Read less

Houston Restaurant Review - Just pitiful performance by Field and Tides