For restaurants that you have gone to more than once, have you ever noticed that the food is not the same depending on what night you go there? This has happened to us twice recently with restaurants we usually really like, but had mediocre meals at best on our most recent visits. At one of them, as we were wondering why the food was so disappointing, we heard someone at the adjacent table say, "You can always tell when ---- is cooking."

At our local favorite, it would be more like "You can always tell when Nico is hungover."

My question is "which manager is on duty tonight?"

Because they offer a gluten-free menu, we eat at the local Outback Steakhouse relatively often. When Manager A is on, service is more attentive and he checks in on all special diet orders personally. When Manager B is on, service is sloppy, and our gluten-free meals are usually screwed up. Last time we were there, it was B night: the sauce that had been gluten-free for the past 2 years was suddenly "not available gluten-free", the green beans were raw - 100% raw - after they went back to the kitchen, they came back DOA. Son's burger patty was blackened, not medium as ordered.

When I asked for the manager and pushed the question of the sauce and made him go check if indeed the recipe had changed and it was no longer gluten-free, suddenly it was fine after all!

I'm tempted to call ahead and check on the manager next time my son wants to eat there.

In your situation, could there have been a new chef replacing the previous one, hence the drop in quality? Reason I speculate such as a possibility is because the mediocrity seems to have pop out on your "last couple" of visits. Meaning if I read you correctly, it wasn't as if after those mediocre run ins you then had the excellent quality again that you used to get.

My wife... oh wait I'm posting OT

Sorry, the phrase "last couple of visits" referred to two different restaurants. That is, we were in the Santa Barbara area, went to two restaurants we've been two at least 2 or 3 times before and enjoyed, and in both cases, the meals were not nearly as good as on our previous visits. In one of them we overheard the comment about a different chef cooking. So it made me wonder. We haven't been back to either one since.

Definitely--depending on who is working in the kitchen, things come out screwed up, etc.

Been to a few places like that.

A Chinese dim sum restaurant near me appears to have an A, B, C and possibly D team depending on day of week. Some days, frozen stuff is just as good if not better. Only been excellent once. It's not uncommon for Chinese restaurants as few of them have chef owners, or at least where the chef, if a hired gun, has any real stake.

A local Thai restaurant (switched from a gourmet restaurant in light of the then-upcoming recession) with the owner-chef trained at the Blue Elephant in London had, on different days, completely different styles of pad thai.

Place I have been a regular at for 15 years used to fit that description. They had a couple chefs that made some awesome dishes. Over time they left and they kept replacing them with lesser qualified burger flippers.

It is a reflection of poor ownershp/management. They don't take the time to write down recipies and train their staff, so everyone does stuff different. I won't order anything more complicated than chicken tenders there now.