Jacksonville Restaurants

As one of the owners of this restaurant, I’ve read this post a few times over the past couple weeks, knowing that a response is necessary, but I’ve kept putting it off in favor of more pressing matters.

Bullet points may not be the most linguistically elegant solution, but are generally very efficient. With that being said…

- My wife Crystal, the general manager, actually is a wonderful person, and she is well educated. Thank you for saying so.

- Our (former, as of now) assistant manager apparently has enough going for her that she’s opening her own restaurant in San Marco, coming summer 2009. Congratulations and good luck Kiley and Sam.

- With regard to omlettes (er, omelettes) for dinner – What can I say? In Europe, particularly France, eggs are a perfectly viable dinner option. Inexpensive, nutritious, and delicious, eggs are one of the world’s most perfect foods. Our omelette is the least expensive entree on our dinner menu, but we put as much care into a nine dollar omelette as we do our whole lobster dish that runs well over thirty bucks.

- Blandness is, I suppose, a matter of personal taste, so one can’t argue with another’s perception of a certain dish. The value of a dish, though, is something that can be looked at objectively, to a degree. As an example, the onion soup that we were out of when you visited the restaurant costs seven dollars and takes the cumulative work of a team of cooks – caramelized onions that cook for six to eight hours, chicken stock that takes the better part of a day, and veal stock that takes several days, plus white wine, roasted garlic, and fresh herbs – a product that I personally taste, and adjust, and taste, and adjust, every time we make it, even though I wrote the recipe. Sometimes we run out of things toward the end of the evening, and I’m okay with that.

- As much as I dislike reading negative reviews, I do always try to objectively analyze whether there any aspects of our operation that could be improved upon. Should your server have known BEFORE she approached the table that we were out of onion soup? No doubt, so we’ve instituted some additional communication guidelines with regard to items that might not be available toward the end of the night. The still water / sparkling water mixup is something that also certainly shouldn’t happen, but it does – our standard operating procedure in this case is to replace all the glasses and provide new bottles of water. Our staff is trained to never do anything that would make guests that are in the restaurant late feel like they’re being rushed – we’re officially open until midnight on the weekends, but it’s common for guests to linger in the lounge or at the bar quite a bit later, and we encourage this.

- Accessing a site like Menuism (or Urbanspoon, or Yelp), announcing yourself as a member of the local restaurant community, and then slagging another local restaurant is suspect, at best. Using such a site to personally complain about an employee of mine is completely inappropriate.