Sage Room — Restaurant in Hilton Head Island

Worst dining experience in a long time. Seems the restaurant gives preferential treatment to regulars and locals, over anyone they don’t quite know. We called and booked a table for 4 for a Friday at 8:30pm. No problem, right? Wrong! We get in and it appears we are not even worthy of a hello from the front desk as they woman is on the phone. Then it became clear they double booked and we were not favored over the locals. When we asked when we will be seated, already 15 minutes past our reservation, a man who I believe is either the manager or someone above the host, spoke down to me as a young woman who doesn’t understand how restaurants work (for the record, I’m not young and I’ve worked in the food industry before, fine dining is not new to me). When asked how long the wait will be, he said as soon as I can get someone up, in the most condescending tone, while explaining how seating works. No one said “sorry, we understand about the wait, please give us a minute. Can we give you someone in the meantime.” It’s simple customer service! When I asked why two separate parties were seated before us, one of them walked it way after, I was told “I can’t seat your party of 4 at a 6 top.” First of all, not my problem and second, I see lots of two person couples at four tops so pretty sure he just needed to seat people and call it a day. I was also looked at strangely by the wait staff because I brought my almost 7 year old, well behaved, steak loving kiddo with me. Seriously?! Your job is to be polite and serve me and my family, while my job is to pay for my meal and that keeps the world going around. All they had to do was just be polite, practice good customer service and things would have been a-ok. Seems I was...

The food was 5 stars, but the service was horrible. I can count on one hand how many times I've had to speak with a restaurant manager in my 45 years, but this was ridiculous. Our reservation was for 8pm. In fairness, we were a large party of 8, but we had made plans over a month in advance. We waited until 8:50pm before they finally attempted to take us to the 1 table that could seat us. I had verified we were a party of 8 at least twice, and every other reservation that showed up was seated immediately, including 4 tables that could have easily been combined for 8 outside. There were many open tables inside as well. When we finally get to the table... It was only set for 6. A few minutes pass while they try to find chairs and silverware with 2 of us standing in the corner. We sit down, and another 10 minutes pass before we even see our server for the first time. The "manager," who was also the bartender, just seemed to think everything was no big deal and bought us all a drink. Bottom line... An hour and 26 minutes passed before we were properly seated and had water in our glasses. Just plain unacceptable for a restaurant this caliber. More disturbing was the "so what" attitude of the manager when we shared our experience. While the food was indeed excellent, we will be going elsewhere on the island. Very disappointing. And, to top it all off, we were then auto-gratted in the amount of 20%! I get that we're a big party... But 20% is for STELLAR service. What a joke. Take your business elsewhere! Especially if you have...

Last night was our first time dining at the Sage Room after all these years of wanting to go there. We were celebrating my birthday. We told the hostess this before we arrived when we arrived and still the waitress had no knowledge of this when we sat down. We let the waitress know it was my birthday. The food came out quickly initially, but the shrimp was not very good and the French onion soup that we were so looking forward to was not as good as expected .

The waitress also forgot my sister’s appetizer salad. By the time she came back to the table for us to tell her this, we were already almost done and our dinner was coming, so we just said to skip it.

I had the halibut special which was $60 for a huge Piece of fish, which was a very good piece of fish. It was just too big and it had a weird breaded crust on it, which I couldn’t decide was an Asian dish or an Italian dish.

My husband had the Sage Room Benedict which he said was very good.

All of our food came out warm, not hot. I think the waitress forgot about us because we were in the back. She then came back to the table and asked us if we wanted dessert and we said no. She held up the menu and said are you sure you don’t want something for your birthday? We thought that she was offering a free dessert for my birthday but when we got the check, we saw that she charged us for the crème brûlée. Which was weird because we had told her we didn’t want anything initially.

Bottom Line is for $250 dinner for three people. We expected better service and...