My wife and I went to Friday's Harbor on Camp Horne Road last week (Friday, June 8th), not expecting much, just some decent casual dining and a cold beer. I had the absolute worst meal of my life. It was astoundingly bad, I mean monumentally bad. I ordered something called "Shrimp in Paradise", billed as "Ginger shrimp, over jasmine rice and broccoli". My wife ordered Filet medallions "dusted" with cracked pepper and sautee'd, finished with cream sauce. Steak au poivre, I've had it elsewhere, it's a pretty standard dish. She was asked how she wanted the filets cooked, and she ordered them medium rare. Vegetable was a "squash medley". Potatoes were red potatoes, she asked if she could substitute mashed, and the server said no problem. First we had the seafood chowder, which wasn't bad. "Crab" in soup was actually sea stix fake crab, whatever. Still tasted ok. salads were nice blend of mixed baby greens, Blue cheese and Ranch dressings were generic, same as you get everywhere. Rolls were spongy yellow egg dough dinner rolls, from at least the day before. Not great, but not offensive. Then come the dinners. As soon as the server set them down I could see that they were complete slop. My wife's "medallions" were 1/2 inch thick slices cut out of the center of the filet. They were cooked way beyond well, as you would expect. Medallions are always cut from the small ends of the tenderloin and filets from the center, to provide a proportional thickness for the weight. No one can cook a 1/2 inch thick piece of meat medium rare. The cracked pepper, which I'd warned her on ordering can sometimes be overpowering, was barely visible. The cream sauce was separated, 1/2 clumpy and 1/2 grease. the "squash medley" was 3 pieces each zucchini and yellow squash, dry and barely heated through, competely raw and unseasoned. She got the red potatoes, not the mashed she requested. The plate for some reason was garnished with lemon slices. Lemon with beef? Lemon with cream sauce? Why? Mine was single-handedly the worst plate of food ever presented anywhere on the planet. 7 dry, cooked, totally tasteless shrimp alternated with barely heated, dry raw broccoli florets, arranged around a plate of dry rice that looked like it had been steamed into submission and left in a steam table since early in the morning, or possibly reheated from yesterday. The grains were dry, blown up to twice the normal size, and completely and utterly tasteless. I've had jasmine rice, basmati rice, arborio rice and other types of "specialty" rice, and this was none of the above. Just plain white institutional foodservice rice, cooked to hell and back. Not one drop of sauce, butter, or seasoning anywhere to be found. No ginger, no garlic. No soy sauce, sweet and sour sauce, or brown sauce. No sauce of *any* kind. No butter, no salt, no pepper. Not a single attempt at applying any sort of flavor of any kind whatsoever. There was no garnish, possibly the lemon was supposed to be mine? I've never complained about food in my life, and I was just so amazed that anyone would attempt to serve this, that I didn't know what to do. I felt as if I'd been robbed. My wife ate most of hers, except for the squash, I ate the tasteless shrimp and a few pieces of crunchy broccoli, with my wife's garnish squeezed over it to make it barely palatable, and we left. Needless to say, we couldn't be forced back at gunpoint. I spent 15 years as a cook and sous chef, and I've eaten everywhere from Palomino's and Pittsburgh Fish Market to Greek food festivals and the chicken-on-a-stick that the Chinese ladies grill on the street in the Strip, and I have never seen such terribly bad, I-don't-give-a-shit plates of food anywhere. If a cook put that up in the window anywhere I had been working, I'd have thrown it at him, and fired him on the spot. One good thing, I've decided that I'll never accept anything like that again, no matter how embarrassing it is to complain. My check was over 50 dollars, and it wasn't worth 5. Joseph Sestrich
Pittsburgh, PA