Pig gets a whole new whistle

Excerpts from her blog, All You Can Eat

What happens when a "great opportunity" falls into your hands? You take it and run with it, says Vuong Loc, owner/chef of Queen Anne's Portage, who has given new life to Greenwood's long-lived Pig 'N Whistle.

Loc and his wife and business partner, Tricia, bought the place in June, gutted and remodeled it and opened for business Friday with a limited menu (Smoked chicken wings! Fried smelt with preserved lemon-mayo! Roast suckling pig with braised cabbage and golden raisins!). Looking to go beyond the fine-dining confines of Portage — a tiny, 2-year-old restaurant that's gotten great acclaim — Loc cast his eyes about in search of a more casual venue where he could offer his take on comfort food and cocktails. (Yes, they'll serve burgers, fish 'n' chips and bangers, plus lots of local beers on tap.) He says he lucked into the Pig 'N Whistle, closed since March.

For now, Loc plans to divide his time between his two restaurants, eventually leaving the Pig's kitchen in the hands of Portage sous-chef James McClain. Tricia Loc recently left her job running the food program at Zoka to manage the Pig 'N Whistle full-time, serving lunch and dinner. Tentative hours: Tuesdays through Sundays from 11:30 a.m. till the bar closes.

A guide to sending your food back

Reader Gaynol Flora teaches cooking for Operation Frontline and is familiar with the goings-on in professional kitchens — having worked in them for eight years. Though she's aware of how hard chefs work, she's uncertain how to handle a problem we've all come across when dining out:

"Could you provide some guidance on the best way to send food back to the kitchen? My husband and I were dining out on a recent Friday night, and our appetizer and one of the entrees [were] so incredibly salty they were inedible. They had a big party in the house, our server was distracted and inattentive, and the kitchen looked like it was really busy, so we didn't send the food back. Now I wish I would have been more assertive.

"How do you tell your server the food is bad? What's the best way to get problems with your meal taken care of?"

Take the advice of this old waitress, Gaynol: Get your server's attention as quickly as possible — regardless of how busy he or she may be. Failing that, hail any other service personnel walking by, whether it's the busboy or the boss. Once you've got someone's ear, tell that person exactly what's wrong and politely ask to have the situation remedied.

As an example, allow me to, er, quote from those beloved cartoon "customers," Goofus and Gallant:

Goofus says: "WAIT-er! How about some water over here! And, yo! What's with this salt lick disguised as a chicken breast?"

Gallant says: "Excuse me, but my proscuitto-wrapped chicken with tapenade is oversalted. Would you be kind enough to take it back to the kitchen and have the chef prepare me another?"

Goofus says: "Hey, you with the apron! When did they reel in this 'daily' catch — during the Reagan administration? And what's with the embryonic veggies?"

Gallant says: "Pardon me, but my $32 troll-caught salmon tastes a bit 'off,' and those baby vegetables are just adorable — but they're also undercooked."

Seeking the opinions of professionals who deal with complaints from a variety of customers like Gaynol, Goofus and Gallant, here's what I learned:

"I've always been appreciative when people let me know there's a problem," says Guy Kugel, who handles the busy front-of-the-house at Belltown's Flying Fish. "If they don't, they're doing the restaurant" (and themselves) "a disservice." From a management perspective, Kugel says, speed is key. "They should let us know there's a problem right away, so we can have the opportunity to fix it right away." Yet he recognizes that it's not uncommon for patrons to keep mum.

"Sometimes people don't want to create a problem at the table," Kugel says. "And that's something the restaurant can't fix."

He recalls receiving letters later: "They'll say, 'I didn't want to tell you this at the restaurant, but ... ' and then they complain about the food." As a manager, says Kugel, his job is to make sure that when things go wrong, they're swiftly remedied and the problem doesn't occur again. As a dissatisfied customer, your job, he says, is to "flag the server down, tell them, 'It's a little too much this, a little too little that,' " and have the problem fixed to your satisfaction. "Any restaurant should want to send everyone out the door happy," he says. "Because word-of-mouth" (especially bad word-of-mouth) "is a very powerful thing."

Of course, there are those who believe sending back food, especially in a busy restaurant, means you'll be sitting there uncomfortably while the rest of your party lets their food get cold, shares it with you or waits for your "fix" to arrive. I've eaten at high-end places whose policy calls for taking everyone's entree back to the kitchen to keep it warm, even resaucing or remaking dishes, as necessary, when one diner's food is being repaired or remade. But you should rest assured that at any restaurant worth frequenting, your "do-over" gets first priority. That priority even has its own lingo: "Give me a burger, medium-rare, 'on the fly!' "

At Schwartz Brothers' Spazzo Italian Grill & Wine Bar in Redmond, GM Scott MacRae explains that food fixes are "the first priority, even if we're up to our elbows in alligators." There, servers present the kitchen with a bright-orange "re-fire ticket" — bearing their name, the table number, an explanation of the problem and what the remedy needs to be. "It goes right to the head of the ticket queue,"MacRae says, and then "it's the manager's duty to run [the fix] out and make sure the guest is happy with it" — standard policy at Schwartz Brothers Restaurants.

Chef Jerry Corso, now working the stoves at Betty on Queen Anne and a familiar face from many of the city's best-known restaurants, notes, "We often have people send food back because they don't like it, and that's sort of irritating. They'll order stuff without [carefully] reading the menu, and don't realize there's garlic, or pine nuts, or a certain herb they don't like." That said, "I generally don't have a problem remaking a dish. If it's not cooked properly, you should send it back." Over the years, Jerry says, he's had people send back dishes they think are too salty, and after tasting the dish himself, he's quietly disagreed. "But we'll take it back anyway and say, 'Would you like something else?' "

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that, when there's something wrong with your food, don't eat three-quarters of the dish and then call your server over and say, "By the way, I hated this!" And if, perchance, you've been ignored all night while the offending dish sits uneaten till it's cleared away, if the server doesn't ask, "Was there something wrong with your meal?" don't go back. If he or she does ask, please speak your mind. How service staff deals with the issue then will help make the important decision regarding whether you should return.

So, waiters, chefs, customers and anyone else who's dealt with this problem: Have you got tales to tell about sending food back? Tips on how to do so gracefully? Feel free to dish on my blog.

This material has been edited for print publication.

Nancy Leson's blog excerpts appear Wednesdays. Reach her at 206-464-8838 or nleson@seattletimes.com