I typically don't take the time to write reviews, but I'm making an exception for Sodolaks. My fiance's family came in from out to celebrate her birthday last weekend. We fell into the regular routine of visiting Sodolaks.
In all reality, we probably eat here about once a month. I wouldn't say we're regulars, but this place was genuinely one of our favorite restaurants in town.
At any rate, it was a busy Saturday evening and after sitting down for a while, our drink orders were finally taken. Hey, it's a Saturday night so I'll definitely cut them some slack. Eventually we ordered our meals and my fiance requested to have a sirloin steak cooked "open flame" style. The waitress was polite, but she stated that it wasn't possible. Some people prefer a sirloin cut to a ribeye because it has less fat. To say the least, it put a dampener on the birthday dinner. I didn't see the reason why they could put a ribeye on the open flame grill but not a sirloin, but hey I don't work there.
She wound up settling for the sirloin cooked in its usual fashion. The issues arose when the food was delivered to the table. My fiance's stepfather received a steak cooked to medium when he requested rare. Her stepfather sent the steak back and instead of cooking a new one they wound up charring the hell out of the original one to the point where it wasn't really edible. As for me, I thought that my steak tasted what I would describe as old. I rarely complain when I'm eating out, because it's a tough industry to work in. However, when I tasted my fiance's steak that most definitely tasted old, I asked to speak with management and told my fiance not to eat one more bite.
Management really didn't care about the issue. Sure they took off half the price of the steak, but having a past within the food industry, I personally would have comped the price of that steak as well as the steak that was not cooked correctly. They stated that their reason for only comping half the steak was that they cut them fresh every morning. While that may be true, it is only one aspect of proper handling of meat. In reality, the meat could have been stored at an improper temperature, cut with equipment that was not sanitized or a whole list of other possibilities.
I'm not sure what happened to their management, but we had an experience quite a while back where they completely resolved the issue and actually cared about our experience.
The best part of the story happened the next day when I had a massive stomach ache and had to setup shop in the bathroom for the day. In addition, I took a day off from work to recover from the food borne illness.
Needless to say, I probably won't be back. Once I get food poisoning from a restaurant, I never go back.
I'm sure most of the time Sodolak's gets it right, heck, they've always gotten it right every time prior with my own set of visits, but I just can't support them anymore after this terrible experience that they could have made right. read more