As someone who has opened number of restaurants, I beg you to reconsider this decision. The fact is that every new restaurant over staffs for an opening. There is only so much you can find out about a person in an interview. If someone has a good resume and gives a great first impression, all you can do is train them and hope they execute when put to the test. The mark of a really well run restaurant is not its ability to higher only the best employees, but its ability to realize when it needs to cut the bad ones loose.

Every new restaurant will have a few hiccups and when Ruby opened his steakhouse downtown am sure he had his fair share of bad reviews. It will typically take a new restaurant about a month or two to work the kinks out of their operations and whittle down the employees that are just not up to par.

I highly encourage you to give the restaurant about a month and try it again. If there are still major problems with the service at that time, then it is probably do to bad management and not just one bad server.

I had one of my employees schedule a dinner for four of their clients – Macy’s, P&G, Great American Insurance, and Unifund – and we decided to go to Oceanaire because it was new, etc. Dinner, dessert, and getting the check took more than 3 hours.

Silly things like, six of the seven entrées arrived at the table, and we spent 10 minutes looking at each other and having the waitress tell us the last entrée was coming. Ugh!

The food tasted fine – so no negative comments about quality – but the steaks were both cooked well vs. the medium rare that was ordered. However, we’d waited so long by that point, we just ate them.

The true measure of how horrific the service was is that the client from P&G, Macy’s, and Great American finally got tired of waiting for our waitress awake from the dead and actually left the restaurant. Was was supposed to be a great evening entertaining our valued clients turned into us apologizing for the restaurant’s service.

I will generally try anything twice – but not Oceanaire. Pass on this one and go to Ruby’s down the street instead.

If you were going for a “budget” version, I think you could easily make a meal out of their apps, which range in price from 95c (seriously) to about $17. Their appetizer portions are easily dinner-sized!

*If there are any takers who want to treat me to Oceanaire feel free to contact me.