My future ex and I decided we would go out to a restaurant for a nice turkey dinner. We chose The Chart House, a restaurant we’ve always loved, both for it’s good food and view of the water. They were serving full turkey dinners today in honor of Thanksgiving.

So there we were, sitting in this lovely place looking out over the water and enjoying the prospect of being waited on this Thanksgiving, and they brought out our “turkey” dinners, and they were DISGUSTING.

We’ve made turkeys at our house for years, some better than others, but none had ever looked like this. The worst you could ever say about one of our turkeys might’ve been “It’s a little dry.” But the turkey dinners we witnessed today, I frankly don’t know how they did it!

You know what prime rib looks like? A big thick piece of meat with that big piece of fat all around it? Well, that’s how the Chart House did their turkey. Not only that, but the fat wasn’t just around the piece of meat, but criss-crossing every which way and in between as well. On every piece! It was unique and amazing.

I called the waiter over to send our meals back to the kitchen and he said he’d send the manager right out. The manager came over to our table and apologized. We said to him, did you see that turkey? He said no, so we told him he really needed to see it. So he went back to the kitchen to have a look.

When he came back out, his words were (verbatim quote here): “Ew! That didn’t look so good!” He said we somehow got the worst, but when he was in the kitchen he saw some very nice looking pieces in the pan, would we like him to hand-select some for us? But we had both lost our turkey appetites and decided to go with something safe, like perhaps undercooked seafood.

Just kidding. The Chart House has always done seafood well and what we ended up ordering was very good. But turkey clearly was not their thing.

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Side note here from the author: I teach music and we have recitals and I would never ask or expect a student to get on stage in front of the public with a piece they weren’t yet prepared to play.

Side note to Chart House: Arby’s has been doing turkey well for years. Maybe your aspiring Thanksgiving chefs should be sent over there to study?

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While we were waiting for our Thanksgiving replacement seafood to arrive, another waiter walked by our table and leaned over and conspiratorially smiled at us and whispered: “I’ve got two more turkey dinners coming up for you!” He was very funny.

On our way home, my future ex said to me, do you want to go for a walk when we get back? I said I would, but first I really needed to blog. He said “Don’t let me stop you. I’m sure you can cough up a few gems.” I was fondly reminded of our beloved, departed cat. She used to cough up a few gems herself.

Note to Chart House: In the name of customer service, if you serve a customer a piece of meat that makes everyone want to vomit and the customer is polite enough to give you a second chance, you might want to think about perhaps offering them a cup of coffee on the house. Or perhaps, serve them a piece of the Thanksgiving pie, which was offered all-inclusive in the turkey dinner. Or maybe, just in good faith, knock $3 off the price of the fish selections to match the cost of the turkey dinner.

They did none of the above. But they did provide the inspiration and (raw material!) for this post.