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Review content:
Salty's is a pricey and fancy meal out, certainly an event restaurant, but does not manage to deliver on what this type of restaurant should be. If I wanted a view with poor service and mediocre food, I'd hit one of the tourist salmon and chowder places on Alaskan Way downtown. Once a meal starts to hit the $100 range, a different level of service and quality is expected.
Just to give you a little perspective, I was raised in NY and I've been a waiter. I'm not shy about tipping, even way over 20%, especially here in Seattle because I'm so infrequently wowed by service that when I am blown away, I just empty my wallet. When Duke's had an Italian restaurant on lower Queen Anne, I left a $40 tip on an $80 Valentine's Day meal because the food was way underpriced (apps, several drinks, dessert, coffee, some more drinks which would be good but not great in NY for Italian), the service was unbelieveably good, and I had planned on spending at least that much anyway.
Back to the matter at hand. My wife and I are likely seen as a poor table, low tip because we don't typically drink out at restaurants. Not frequently, but often enough, we see a correlation of this to bad service, as we did at Salty's. We came in early on a weekday, well before dinner rush (4:30 or so)
Our waitress did not discuss specials or make any special attempt to work the menu (as we watched several other waiters do). She did not check on us at all during the wait or meal ( I prefer minimal unobstrusive checking, even better is when things are refilled or show up without you asking, neither of these happened).
The chowder was decent, but my wife's salad was awful. 75 minutes later (yes you read right), after several tables came and went, our entrees arrived. The waitress blamed it on the kitchen, but the well melted fray of freshly shredded parmesan on my seafood pasta clearly indicated that it had been sitting under a heat lamp for quite some time (parmesan isn't a particularly easy to melt cheese), so it was at least partially her fault. The seafood pasta had 2-3 each of a clam, small shrimp, mussel, and calamari. The heat lamp worked wonders on the seafood as well. Not the bounty of the sea I was expectig. My wife's $40 medium rare steak was grey in the middle (should be pink, juicy, and warm, not hot). Now, I will be the absolute first to tell you that Salty's is not a place to get steak, it's not what they do. However, a $40 steak in an event restaurant should still be competently prepared.
We were offered dessert on the house for the wait, which we took to go. Dessert was excellent, as it always is there, too bad it wasn't preceded by a decent meal.
If you have something to celebrate, celebrate elsewhere.
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