Yikes! It's not often that we experience something this bad, and maybe it was just a perfect storm of unusual bad for this place -- you decide...
The Pilot House is part of an upscale resort complex and we were thrilled to have a "fancy" night out for our family's last night (7/5/2013) in this clam shack town. I was so excited as they even had two vegetarian options on their menu. I called to see if we needed to make reservations or if we could just arrive. I was told that they were very busy from 6:30 on and we might not get a table if we don't have a reservation. The woman on the phone also told me their dress code was resort casual which means no jeans, tank tops or flip flops. So I made our reservation for 6:15.
The dining room is large and airy and quite pretty. There were two other tables seated when we arrived and probably 20-30 empty tables. We were directed to a table next to the windows and right across from the hostess stand and immediately we noticed the shredded caning on all the chairs at our table. And after a quick look around, it looked like the restaurant needed to replace most of their chairs. I should have known from that first impression what we were in for, but we were so looking forward to a nice meal out together so we kept our optimism up...
Our waitress was all smiles and very pleasant. My husband and I both ordered a caesar salad to start and it was yummy even if the romaine had been cut hours earlier (from the tell-tale rusty edges of the cut). I was also glad that it wasn't served with croutons and the dressing wasn't too heavy.
After asking the waitress which entree she would suggest of the two vegetarian options, she suggested the Warm Summer Quinoa Salad $22 (Marinated tofu, Maine vegetables, avocado cilantro dressing). My husband ordered the Banana Leaf Haddock $25 (Coastal Maine haddock, crab stuffed, Meuniere sauce). And our son ordered a children's cheeseburger with fries ($7.95) which looked like a slightly enlarged slider. He thought it was great!
My meal came in an oversized bowl/dish with a huge heaping glob of quinoa with cubed zucchini and red bell peppers trapped within the sticky grain and topped with a large fanned quarter of avocado and three very yellowed celery leaves as garnish. The quinoa was overcooked and clumpy. The flavor was slightly sour, kind of bitter and the veggies were overcooked and mushy. I took three tries at tastes from different areas of the dish and all were frankly gross. Obviously the "chef" didn't taste this dish before serving it. I mean how can someone make this yummy grain and local vegetable turn out so bad??!! So I waited to inform our waitress when she returned to ask how everything was...
My husband's meal was delivered and as it was placed on the table by the runner, a piece of porcelain from the corner of his square dish fell onto the table. He noticed that the corner of his plate had been hit and slightly shattered. He didn't see any evidence that the shards of glass had gone into his plate and his fish was completely encased in a sealed banana leaf. After waiting for 10 minutes for our waitress, he finally decided to unwrap the fish and give it a try. The fish looked perfectly cooked but there was no sauce and the crabmeat stuffing turned out to be a slight dusting of crabmeat ever so sparingly sprinkled on top of the fish before it was wrapped up. He said it had very little flavor whatsoever and he thought they might have forgotten to add the sauce.
After 1/2 an hour sitting and waiting for our waitress to return, I observed the other patrons in the restaurant. It was now 7:20 and the place was less than half full. Many patrons were dressed extremely casually and one woman was even in a jersey sundresses with flip flops and wet marks, having obviously just finished swimming. Having been passed by our waitress maybe a dozen times without acknowledging us, we flagged down another waitress desperate to order more drinks. When she noticed I was sitting in front of an untouched entree, she asked if everything was okay. I asked her to take it away saying that it was not very good. She apologized and said that the manager would be over to speak with us.
At 7:30 our waitress arrived, all smiles asking if we were ready to order dessert. We updated her about our unfortunate meal and she also apologized. She rattled off all the dessert options and the children ordered the chocolate cake. Fifteen minutes later she returned with a slice of chocolate cake, and a slice of cheesecake. She said that they only had one slice left and she wouldn't charge us for the cheesecake. We were the third table that night -- how can they be out of chocolate cake?!! We asked for the bill so we could leave as quickly as possible. The manager never did pay us a visit, but the waitress removed the quinoa from our bill. We rushed out of there as I was hoping to hit a clam shack on the way back to our cabin as I was still mostly hungry!! read more