Last night at a restaurant some distance from Chattanooga, I did something I regret: I lodged a complaint. Well, not exactly a complaint. It was more like an unwelcome clarification. What happened was that I ordered what the menu called a roasted beet salad appetizer, but what arrived did not actually contain roasted beets. I don't think I was wrong about this: I've made my share of roasted beets, and of my four dining companions, at least one other agreed that what lay sprawled across my plate was roasted beets' flaccid fraternal twin: beets that had been either canned, or pickled, or both. So I suggested this to the waiter.
It was a clarification he did not take well to. His smile departed. His demeanor hardened. The beets were as described, he said; he knew because he had watched them being prepared. While I had my doubts about the veracity of his account - research studies have proven time and again that eyewitness testimony is fraught with bias - I didn't want to argue. I liked the salad, I assured him. I just happen to be a stickler for truth in marketing. I did not say this last part. Nevertheless, there would be no more kindness from our waiter, who moments before had seemed so delighted by our presence.
That night I googled the proper way to lodge a complaint in a restaurant. In a nutshell, you should be polite, mention the problem as soon as you're aware of it (not after you've polished off your meal) and be clear about how you'd like it resolved. I'm happy to say that I was, I think, polite, and I did mention the beets immediately. I didn't suggest a resolution, however, because aside from the salad being an uninspired lie of an appetizer, it was perfectly fine to eat. My husband and I are decades out from the days when we turned our noses up at the canned, pickled beet slabs that topped every Italian restaurant salad, until the day we actually tried one and liked it, after which we vied for who got the bigger slab. What I'm saying is, I find beets in any form pretty acceptable, but more importantly, those restaurants never pretended their beets were anything they weren't.
So I was bothered by our waiter's defensiveness. I'm reminded of the story about my husband's ex-girlfriend, who sent back a steak so many times the chef himself finally came out to their table, took her by the hand, and said, "Come. Let's cook this steak together." That, my friends, is accommodation in action, and that isn't anything like what I was looking for.
Which makes me wonder what, exactly, I was looking for. Since I wasn't requesting a replacement salad with actual roasted beets, did I just need to flex my gastronomical muscle? As foodies go, I'm about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10. I'm a respectable cook who has never sickened anyone (there was some suspect turkey once that did cause my husband to vomit, but in my defense, I ate it too, and I was fine). And while I do have a fantasy of opening a soup café one day, I realize that having a repertoire of three good soups does not a café make. But of everything in the world of cooking I do not understand or have patience for - and this includes, apparently, turkey safety, as well as a well thought-out soup philosophy - roasted beets are something I actually do understand. And maybe that's why I had to say something.
In the end, my husband's ex-girlfriend did not go to the kitchen to help the chef cook her steak, and I did not go to the kitchen to watch my chef roast beets, so it's really anyone's guess whether she could have taught her chef a thing or two and whether I might have caught ours in a tangled web of alternative beet facts. In thinking about it (at length, it turns out), I believe that all I wanted last night was for the waiter to say, "You're right." Maybe he could have explained that they just couldn't get their hands on fresh beets or that they sold out of them moments before we arrived, all dressed up and with a yearning for roasted root vegetables. Either of these responses would have made it all OK. Because in my opinion, the raw truth is always more satisfying than a half-baked defense.
Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor and travel writer with work in Oxford American, Next Avenue, PBS and forthcoming in Garden & Gun.