Our First Restaurant Review!

Turner's Seafood of Salem. Worst restaurant of the new millennium. Yes, it was that bad. We don't normally write reviews, but our experience at Turner's Seafood was so poor that we felt we should at least give our readers a heads up.

Being aficionados of oysters our first inkling that things were going to go awry should have been the big black-board in the restaurant listing the specialty oysters available. It didn't make sense as the origin and the variety didn't match. If we ordered the oysters would we get the variety we wanted, or should we order by origin to get what we want? A guessing game with oysters! When we pointed it out to the person behind the market counter he replied, "Oh yes, it's wrong". We should have left. 

But no, we waited for our table, ordered our wine, only to be served the wrong (cheaper) wine from what we ordered. Our waiter made a befuddled attempt at figuring out what went wrong and then replaced the drinks. Then took the dinner order for 2 of our party of 3 (completely forgetting to take the order of GB who was right next to the waiter).

40 minutes later our food arrived. Well, it wasn't really what we ordered. 2 of the dishes were not prepared as ordered (and we suspect that the 3rd dish was also not what was advertised in the menu), most egregiously the baked seafood platter brimming with heavily fried seafood. Turns out our befuddled waiter entered the order incorrectly. As it would be awhile before GB's dish was replaced, and the other 2 had to eat their entrees, our waiter offered GB a dessert to eat. Before the entree. And GB wasn't even going to order a dessert.

The coup de grace was when the "baked seafood platter" arrived (scallops, scrod and shrimp) with a paltry amount of food. So paltry that GB couldn't initially find the scrod. Which was due to the scrod filet literally being the size of GB's pinky and deep under a broth concoction. It was drowning! The resemblance was akin to a cup of seafood chowder and nothing like a baked seafood platter. It simply was inedible.

But it gets better! We politely asked to speak to the "top manager" in charge to explain the many problems we were encountering and out came Charlene, who we can only say was dismissive, argumentative, and most unwilling to make things right. The nerve of us to question someone who claims to have worked for Turner's Seafood for 16 years! And we should be pleased that we only had to pay just over $100 to walk out of the restaurant!

As one restaurant patron said of her meal, "It was bad, and a lot of it".

We notice that the Executive Chef of the restaurant, Yale Woodson, proclaims on the web site,

"Our team selectively sources and prepares food to please the full range of the senses, stimulating, and striving to create a memorable seafood dining experience… every visit, every time".

If that's what it's like every time then we are grateful for the warning.

And as GB didn't get dinner what did he do for food?

Check out his rather delicious dinner below, procured from 7-11 of Gloucester (ironically around the corner from a Turner's Seafoods market). A delightful chicken parmesan sandwich with luscious chocolaty milk. Finally, a decent meal! And we'll have our usual posting later this morning!