Seawitch Restaurant & Oyster Bar — Restaurant in New Orleans

UPDATE: I already knew that this was going to be the type of unprofessional response that should be expected based on your response in person and the responses to other customers. Question, If you did not taste the food specifically, how can you comment on someone else’s experience with your food? Further, you as the manager articulated that the check could be split 4 ways after your waitress said that checks cannot be split. As previously stated, you and your waitress created the spectacle and the disturbance. And let’s also correct one other the thing, the majority of the food was left on the table. My friend ate her food while it was lukewarm and mushy. The very same points that you thought you were making are not points at all. It reads like a defensive unprofessional. If you don’t want to be challenged on your INCONSISTENT policies, say that. But to get on a platform and argue with the customers that keep your establishment open is very unprofessional. The saddest part is that this seems to be the tone and reaction for any negative reviews. Very unprofessional and sad but expected.. To any future customers…just consider, all of the bad reviews can’t be wrong and “mischaracterizing.”

If I could offer fewer stars, I would give zero stars. The lobster was mushy (overcooked). Further, the real issue was the poor customer service. Our party did not arrive at the same time. This did not seem to be an issue, as my friend ordered drinks and appetizers. My friend asked for the check, particularly if the check could be split. The waitress told her that the check could not be split. No problem. My waitress came to the table 4 times to tell my friend that they would be running out of lobster soon. My friend went ahead and ordered three lobster plates. My friend was willing to pay the entire bill. After the waitress delivered the check, the manager arrived and asked if there was an issue. My friend was totally taken aback as there were no issues that she knew of. Our food would be cold when we arrived but that would be on us because we were late. I wish I could add the waitress or the manager’s name, however neither provided their name. The manager had on a black and white wig and the waitress had pigtails. When I arrived, the waitress returned and asked if I would like to see a drink menu. I said yes, over 10 mins later she brought the drink menu. Once my friend backfilled me on her experience up to that point, I paid the $156 bill…and asked to speak with a manager. From the moment the manager began speaking she began making excuses. She insisted that the waitress was ‘confused’ abt if my friend had an issue with the check. My friend reiterated that the only question that she had was could the check be split. The manager said that the check could not be split more than 4 ways. First off, the waitress stated that the check could not be split at all, but the manager said no more than 4 ways. There were only 3 of us.Secondly, this whole experience could have been solved with an apology, not doubling down on bad customer service. The entire experience from beginning was...

After a very unfortunate experience at this restaurant several weeks ago, I left it to my friend to write a review, as she was the one most severely impacted. However, after the restaurant responded to her review by gaslighting her, I now feel compelled to chime in. If you would like a full play-by-play of the many incidents involved in our experience, please check out her review, which is completely factual. I am mainly here to address several of the invalidating claims that management made in their response to her review.

First of all, my friend is well-aware that, outside of going to a gluten-free restaurant, one can never have a truly "safe" dining experience in a scratch kitchen. She travels for work and eats out several times per week -- this is not news for her. However, it is one thing to say that there might be cross-contamination with some items and another entirely to erroneously tell a customer that an item is made without gluten. Two "safe" items, the fried oysters and ribs, turned out to have flour and soy sauce, respectively, both of which explicitly contain gluten. The manager and waiter both should take accountability for sharing misinformation, which could have ruined our night even more than our experience did.

Secondly, our experience as customers was drastically mischaracterized in the restaurant's response. Our waiter did not "try to help and calm the situation" -- he exacerbated it. He literally threw a temper tantrum and stormed away from our table, claiming that he was going to get us another waiter. His attempts to de-escalate involved him telling us to take deep breaths and forcing us into awkward hugs... I'm sorry, what? What part of us playing therapist to a grown man constitutes a desirable "personalized interaction"? I have NEVER been made to feel so uncomfortable by a waiter in my life. No amount of free drinks can make up for the impact this had on our evening.

I totally understand that a restaurant should respond to all of its reviews, especially negative ones. However, attempting to deliberately mislead future customers in a response is shameful. They should be attempting to resolve the situation with her/us, not gaslighting her due to a lack of accurate information. I could have written off our experience as a fluke, but their response shows that the managers of this restaurant lack self-awareness and reflection. I can only hope that they learn from this experience and do better...

First, I would like to say I never post reviews, so this is a big deal for me. We arrived to find off street parking, which is a plus in the city. We were taken upstairs to our reservation table. The server never introduced himself to start to dinner, nor did he ask anything like are we celebrating anything tonight? When ordered the meal took a bit to get to us. It wasn't that busy there (7:30pm) During that time the server repeated to us what the next table had said to him in a conversation. (We had our 14 year old girl with us, as we celebrating her birthday and my wife's birthday together.) He told us "She said (lady at the next table) she wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire", and he then left. I don't know who "he" was, nor I don't care. I was in a state of disbelief. I'm a local at a high dollar venue, and to say that to us as we sat there, it wasn't funny. Next the food, my panned veal was burnt (breading), and it was as tough and difficult to cut (grisle). The crawfish sauce and veal was cold. My wife's red snapper had a strange fish taste. (We have lived and ate on the Gulf Coast for three decades, and she said that she never had snapper taste that way.) It came out cool too. The 14 year old's steak was ordered medium, (that's how she likes it), and it came back rare to medium rare. Hers went back to the kitchen, and it still came back slightly medium rare. She ate as much as she could. The server apologized to us for the steak and comped me a glass of wine. He never asked how our meal was, and he looked like he knew it wasn't going well. He brought out a large piece Key Lime Pie we ordered for dessert. It was good, but nothing special. We saw the prices before we ordered (and looked them up the menu on line), but for the quality of food...nope. Fool me once shame on you, but there will be no second chance. I'm a local, and there are plenty of other places to eat here in New Orleans. The concept of the food was good, but execution was poor. I tipped 20%, so that made the whole experience just shy of $300. It was disappointing. We saved up for this, and read reviews too. I don't know how it got those prior reviews since our meal was this bad. Portion size was fine, but cold burnt panned veal, under cooked steak, and weird fishy taste for snapper. Sorry. As I stated above, I do not write reviews, but...