From Chevy’s website: “We’re known for our mesquite-fired flavor and farm fresh ingredients. We use only top-quality ingredients to create all of your favorites like sizzling fajitas, mouthwatering guacamole, flautas, and handcrafted margaritas…no one does them better.”
Or do they? Twenty-one years ago we went to the Emeryville Chevy’s Fresh Mex to celebrate John’s twenty-first birthday, half his life ago. Our family, John’s friends, his girlfriend de jour, Cavan, all eight of us looking forward to an evening out.
Looks good, doesn’t it
After dinner I took the opportunity to thank the staff for a memorable evening:
February 28, 2000
Last night my wife and I hosted a party of eight at Chevy's in Emeryville. We had planned a celebration in honor of our younger son's twenty-first birthday, and we asked him to select a restaurant where we could enjoy both good food and a lively atmosphere. However, we all agreed as we left that we had all experienced the worst dining experience we had ever had.
I'm still amazed a day later that…
No one came to bus the dishes that had been left on our table by the previous diners. We carefully stacked them and brought them to the edge of the table, and after about fifteen minutes, were able to coerce a busboy to remove them. (We were told that one busboy "was sent home", and that the bar area was short a busboy; nevertheless, when we finally were able to spot this busboy he was busing an empty table in the corner; oblivious to our needs;)
The busboy never did wipe the table. We were able to moisten a paper napkin left from the previous diners, dip it into a half-drunk water glass, and use it to clean the salsa, beans, and other culinary detritus left from other peoples' dinners.
We never received chips. After several minutes I stood in line with a waitress and busboy, took the chips and served them to our table. The salsa couldn't be found. It arrived minutes later with our dinners…
Which came just a minute or so after the two pitchers of margaritas. The tardiness of the drinks' arrival wouldn't have been so bad had we been able to pour them into glasses. Our waitress, Shanna, brought us five glasses, but there were eight of us. We tried to find other glasses for the three of us who didn't get any. We searched the closed room off to the side; we looked at tables where a clean glass might have been abandoned; finally, we stood in line again at the bar and managed to get two more glasses. The birthday boy, who had ordered a virgin piña colada, received his drink at the end of the evening, just as our bill arrived.
And the food? It looked good. However, none of us had any silverware, so we couldn't eat it. We waited several minutes, then sent our waitress on a silverware hunt. No luck. I checked with the manager who promised that she'd get us some silverware. We sent Jason on a silverware search. Hey, now we're getting somewhere. The food has only been on the table for about six or seven minutes, and at least three people were looking for silverware for us. I felt better.
After about ten minutes the silverware finally arrived, and five of us began eating. However, Scott and I couldn't eat because we had no dinners. A few minutes later my combination shrimp and baby back rib fajitas arrived, but since there were only a couple of packages of tortillas for all eight of us—and virtually all of us had ordered fajitas—I had to eat my dinner with a knife and fork. The food was okay, although my wife said her chicken was very dry. But after what we were going through, a little bad food seemed inconsequential.
The waitress said that the manager had agreed to reduce our bill by $2 per meal. I said "That's inadequate. The least I'll consider is half." I wish I hadn't said that. The meal should have been free. Actually, you should have paid us for the abuse and neglect to which you subjected us.
On the bright side none of us choked to death, nor does any of us think we might have contracted some rare, bizarre tropical disease associated with food poisoning. The restaurant didn't catch fire. No earthquakes. No tidal waves. No one held the place up. (I'm trying to find the silver lining here somewhere).
As an ironic and comedic footnote to an otherwise thoroughly unpleasant evening…as we stepped away from Chevy's we managed to avoid three piles of vomit that one of your busboys was trying to clean up by your front entrance. In no way do we suggest that Chevy's was responsible for this gastronomic disaster, but the implication that someone else might have had a less than favorable experience at Chevy's wasn't lost upon any of us. We climbed in our cars and drove away.
There was nothing funny about the whole experience. It was, as I stated in the beginning of my letter, both a culinary disaster and an egregious lapse of hospitality amplified by the fact that this was intended to be a special evening for us, a twenty-first birthday celebration. You should be ashamed.
David and Jadyne Buchholz
Part II.
Twenty-one years later. Cavan is gone. John married Kim, and they have two children. Scott, one of John’s high school friends, is still a friend. And then the rest of us—Jason, Jennifer, Jadyne, and yours truly—we’re still around.
So, it has recently become a Mother’s Day/Father’s Day event for the offspring to take their parents out to dinner to celebrate. And what started as a joke—going back to Chevy’s in Emeryville—became a reality last night, our first visit to Chevy’s in twenty-one years. We arrived at 6:00 were welcomed (not recognized) by the staff, had dinner in front of the fireplace and enjoyed beer and margaritas. We all remembered Chevy’s Part I, and we recalled events from the letter. The offspring gifted me with a mug that has their photos on it, the same as the one they gave Jadyne, but with a different image.
It was a very different evening. And even if the service was indifferent, the food only okay, memories of the evening twenty-one years ago were lost among the spirited and animated conversation, the sharing, the love, joy, and appreciation we all have as a family, mixed in with the unspoken gratitude that we’re all still here.
We stepped away from Chevy’s and walked for a few minutes before getting in our cars and heading home. The Emeryville Chevy’s is situated on the bay, and as we left, I captured the sun setting over Mount Tamalpais, a very different image from the vomit that we stepped around twenty-one years earlier.
P.S. And what was the effect of the letter? The GM apologized and issued John and me two gifts for an “All you can eat and drink for two.” He and Cavan went back. Jadyne and I did, too.