Dye’s Gullah Fixins on Hilton Head Island

There is nothing more rewarding for a Sacramento real estate agent than to receive a referral from a happy client. No purer words in the universe sound better to my ears than to hear so-and-so referred me to you when I answer my phone. The problem is I have so many clients named so-and-so that I don’t always recognize immediately who they are talking about, but one thing I do guarantee is that my client will be happy.

The problem that can happen once in a blue moon is I won’t make a client happy. That’s life. It’s human nature. Every once in a rare Autumn day a client might go Ying and I might go Yang. If that happens, I release them. Immediately. There is no argument, no long drawn-out discussion about who is right and who is wrong because it doesn’t matter if one person is unhappy. You can’t have a happy couple if one party is unhappy all of the time, and the same is true in business.

How one person my husband and I met yesterday handled an unhappy person and her end result makes for a good story, so I will share it with you here. Meet Dye Scott-Rohdan of Dye’s Gullah Fixins in Hilton Head, South Carolina. She serves up a whole mess o’ Southern fried chicken, sweet potato fries and cabbage salad, or a crab or shrimp burger or plate o’ ribs, created from old family recipes. What she calls authentic lowcountry food and I call comfort food. Especially her butter-soaked, melt-in-your-mouth corn bread!

One customer was unhappy. That customer jumped on an online rating system and posted a vile review. First, you have to wonder about a person who would be so vile as reviews are only as good as the source from whence they come. Some people are nuts. In fact, a lot of people are nuts, and the longer I am in real estate, going on 40 years now, knock on wood, the more I know this fact to be the solid truth. This person said Dye had an attitude and she would never eat in that restaurant.

The truth, because don’t you know there are always two sides to a story — even to my stories, and even when I know I am 100% in the right, there are always two sides. Turns out a customer came into the restaurant with her husband and kids in tow. The kids in tow were toting McDonald bags filled with McDonald’s food. Even though there were items on the menu the kids could eat like fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.

Dye explained they could not eat in her restaurant because the kids needed to order from the menu. As an alternative, she suggested the parents could get a take-out order for themselves and have a picnic with the kids down the street in a park. Completely miffed, apparently, that this couple couldn’t get their own way and let their kids take up seats reserved for paying customers and perhaps even set an unwelcome trend, the family stormed out. Then one of the family members posted a nasty review online.

Don’t you just hate people like that? Yes, and so does everybody else. Dye is such a sweet person, and you can tell after a brief conversation that she didn’t deserve such crap. But evil people who dish out crap rarely stop to consider anything beyond their own little universe.

What happened is others read the review and thought: Wow, I need to get me some of that food that these people were so eager to get and were refused. The food must be really good at Dye’s Gullah Fixins for this person to be so mad. The reviewer never mentioned the food because she never got any.

And they are right. The food is marvelous! So, the awfully mean “review” backfired.

Dye’s Gullah Fixins is located at 840 William Hilton Parkway inside the Atrium Building. Reservations are a must: 843.681.8106 but catering / take-out is also available.