It’s a classic tale of a floundering seafood restaurant. At first the food is fresh and delicious, then a few less customers come in and they have to start lowering the budget. The food suffers. The chef can’t recreate the flavors with frozen and canned ingredients, so the customers stop. The management changes and the cycle repeats until finally they can’t find someone to shift everything back into shape and it all crashes.
It’s these sort of stories that once required a wake-up call and total makeover by the famous Gordon Ramsay and his crew behind the show “Kitchen Nightmares“, later revamped to “24hrs to Hell and Back“; if not “Restaurant Impossible” featuring sledgehammer-wielding, Robert Irvine. Not all restaurants fall this way, but it’s as common as a cold if it’s not a fast-food chain. Our spotlight restaurant is “The Reel Seafood Company” formerly of Albany NY.
My mother went there in the late 80’s after her friend gave the oysters a 5 star personal review. Upon my mother’s visit, she was served a bowl full of salt, pasty chowder with uncooked lumps of flour and no essence of flavor. Management switched hands between then and the late 2010’s.
This is what it was like to the general public in 2019: https://www.yelp.com/biz/reel-seafood-albany-2
That’s when my step-father John, went in for a dinner date with my mom and me for her birthday in July 2016. Things had definitely improved by then, to the point that I was advised to take Lauren there for dinner on our first ever 1st date anniversary on March 25th 2017, conveniently during restaurant week, so the special was 3 courses, but we liked the menu options better. I had the Giovanni linguini with scallops in white wine sauce and she tucked into a stuffed haddock after we polished off the raw bar’s best oysters.
FYI: No real scientific proof has been found about oysters increasing sexual desire. 2015 “Sexual Medical Reviews” journal says; they’re great for increasing zinc, male hormone health, serotonin and amino acids, but the goo-goo eyes are a placebo-effect.
We loved it so much and the staff was rather pleasant, yet sophisticated. It became our favorite haunt. I remember having the ruby-red spiced jambalaya, the legendary cioppino, (Think of that as a shellfish lover’s platter complete with claw-crackers, wipes and a plastic bib topped with a lobster tail) and the stuffed haddock. The bread always accompanied one container of olive oil and balsamic vinegar mix, one ball of plain butter and one ball of fruit-flavored butter like strawberry or blueberry. It was a dead give-away that the bread rolls came reheated from the consistency, but then again, I’ve always liked poppy seed.
Later on, we began to see some changes in their quality of food. The rolls were the same. The butter trios were still delicious, but the jambalaya Lauren recommended to me was different, stew vs soup consistency. We thought it was a different chef in the kitchen and thought nothing of it. The flavors were still there, you know? Moving on, we saw more and more chicken dishes coming up on the menu. We all know the one person in a seafood joint who can’t stand fish, so they get something from the small meat-section in a wine reduction paired with veg. When we go to a seafood restaurant, we expect there to be a majority towards aquatic dishes, whether it be sushi, white fish, salmon or any kind of crustaceans or mollusks. As we continued to visit, the more chicken replaced some of the fish dishes we knew and loved. Jambalaya was the first thing to go, then the cioppino and to our shock, the Giovanni just to name 3. Sure, there were still fish and chips, clam chowder and salads, but those you can get at a low-end diner or a fish-fry place for a lower price. It’s like the Sparkle paper towel commercial use to say, “Why pay extra for something, like gourmet chicken nuggets?”
We went one last time in celebration of Jeremy’s paper being published and my new state job in January 2020. The raw bar was a fine treat, but the chicken had nearly overtaken the entire menu. Why? Chicken is cheap, well-liked and very familiar to people. It’s a safe staple for the restaurant industry eaten by anyone who isn’t vegan, vegetarian, pescitarian or Catholic during Lent on Fridays. Yes, it’s important to change the menu to keep things interesting, and we understand it was also a steakhouse, but the taste was off on both of our orders with clear signs of the stuffed haddock having been frozen. If I wanted something processed out of a box, I could’ve bought it for next to nothing with coupons. We left with complimentary mints and thanked ourselves for not having gotten dessert, or signed up for their restaurant loyalty app. A week later, we found a notice online stating that The Reel Seafood Company was shut down for good.
What have we learned here? When management cuts corners on what really counts is not going to have much longevity. A successful restaurant does only 1 thing, give the customers what they want: Natural ingredients, Cooked well at Fair costs and they’re Happy to do it for your satisfaction.