RJ Bentley’s Salvages a Mediocre Dining Experience...and a Customer

Business: RJ Bentley’s Restaurant
Location: 7323 Baltimore Ave (Rte. 1), College Park, MD
Date of incident: 7/22/06, ~3:00 P.M.

Quick Hit
Management and a waitress at this College Park landmark turned a down-right forgettable dining experience into one to remember, and, despite one major gaffe, managed to retain a customer.

The Run-up
It’s not often that a business snatches victory from the jaws of defeat of its own volition, when it comes to customer service, that is. Most of the time unfortunately it takes flared tempers--and nostrils--raised voices, and, too often, heart-felt threats for customers to get satisfaction these days. But management at RJ Bentley’s Restaurant in College Park, MD, must operate by some long begotten, Knights-of-the-Round-Table-esque code of customer service, judging by what me and my family experienced there today (Saturday, 7/22).

We stopped in for a late lunch, a spot that we had patronized before with pretty good results. Why today’s dining experience was to be so different, I have no idea.

It began inauspiciously from the moment we started to order. Our waitress Amy had to say “Sorry, we’re all out…” (baked potatoes, feta cheese, etc.) so many times that even she got a little disgusted with herself. Then later when my wife lamented that “This is a pretty sorry-looking Cobb salad,” (but decided not to complain, but make the most of it) we had officially reached our event horizon. But the worse was yet to come.

The Meat
Fortunately my two youngest children’s meals each came with an abundant amount of fries, because my son only ate one of the shrimp from his fried-shrimp basket before complaining that he did not want them. He’s usually not a very finicky eater, so my wife and I chalked it up to fatigue. And since he was chowin’ down on the fries we decided to just let it go. But for some reason, near the end of our meal, my wife reaches over and pulls a shrimp from his basket. I think she was mostly disgusted by the waste—my son having barely disturbed them. But as she inspected the half-eaten, breaded crustacean more closely, a look of repulsion came across her face and she exclaimed, “This shrimp ain’t even cooked!” (She reverts to the vernacular like that, losing her Master’s Degree temperance, when she feels one of her children threatened.) She handed the white meat across the table to me to inspect. I had seen sushi “doner” looking. It even appeared to have un-cooked, wet batter or dough in the cavity where the “vein” had been removed.

My son had been immediately exonerated of his frivolity, and now my wife’s ire had really been piqued. The next time Amy approached our table she started in, “If you’re all done I’ll take some of this stuff away and bring your check…” “That’s fine, but there’s a problem with my son’s meal…the shrimp is woefully under-cooked,” I interrupted. Amy inspected the basket and agreed emphatically, “Oh, yeah!…Let me talk to my manager…” And as she departed, my wife’s voice trailed after her, “And take that off the bill!”

My reaction was to wonder out loud, “Well, what does she need the manager for? She saw that it was undercooked with her own two eyes!” I expected Amy to simply return to tell us the obvious, that her manager--Eric, it turned out, is his name--told her to remove my son’s meal from the bill. Oh, but no! Eric had obviously graduated magna cum laude from the Golden Rule School of Customer Service. He had Amy pull out all the stops. She first asked us if my son had gotten enough to eat and whether he wanted to order something else. And then without taking a breath she matter-of-factly added, ”My manager said your entire meal is on the house today.”

Now that's how you recover after falling down with your pants around your ankles!

I was thunderstruck. We’re a family of five, after all. Since we never saw a bill, I can only estimate that the total charge would have been at least $60.00, plus tax and tip. But Amy was very apologetic and gracious about the whole thing. She seemed genuinely embarrassed by the scene.

But we declined more food, despite the fleeting temptation to be just a little gluttonous on someone else’s dime. We thanked Amy for making a potentially very contentious situation quite tenable in the end, and then my wife left her a $5.00 tip.

Epilogue
Now see, if I ran a restaurant, or practically any business, that’s the way I’d clean up my messes. Everybody has a bad day every now and then. And that probably applies two-fold to service-oriented businesses, where constant and repeated interaction with the same customer(s) can set up wait staff for failure on some level over and over again during the course of a day. But Eric and Amy did what they had to do in order to salvage everybody’s Saturday afternoon in this instance. They really "milked a chicken" ("Shorty" Don, circa 1983) in salvaging this one. Of course, I don’t know whether the chef was docked the $60.00 for falling asleep at the fry basket (actually the shrimp would have been overcooked had he/she fallen asleep, right?), but that’s not my concern. It’s after midnight as I compose this post, and my son hasn’t been painfully awakened by some vicious, shrimp-dwelling parasite yet. So I think we’re in the clear there.

Yeah, I’d go back to RJ Bentley’s, especially armed with this entreaty for the hostess or manager: “You know, last time I was here…”