If this is your first Rant, please see last week’s entry for a full explanation of its origin. It may or may not be necessary. Truth be told, I am just trying to impress with my new, learned talent of link creation! Not to worry, I will bore myself soon enough, but for the moment it is all new to me!
This week’s rant addresses the issue of the large party. I think you know what I am talking about….
Excited for an evening out “on the town,” you race home from work on a Friday evening, or a late afternoon soccer game on a Saturday, to dress like a crazy lunatic and then fight the traffic into the city for your coveted 7:30 reservation at a place you’ve been dying to try. You finally reach your table, are handed a menu and a promise of a wonderful evening so attainable now, that you can feel it in your bones. You let out a sigh of relief and settle in to decide on your drink for the evening. For this, uh humm, very real example, we’ll say you decide on Sangria.
The drinks take a long time time to appear. In fact, although the restaurant is surprisingly empty, the server has disappeared altogether. Hmmmm….
Then it hits you like the proverbial lead balloon……….the large party!
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Let me break this down for you. It’s restaurant week, and while I am usually not a fan of reviewing a restaurant during this period of time, for several reasons. I still live by my life long motto: Girl’s Gotta Eat!
Needless to say, expectations are slightly lower for most of us during restaurant week. Restaurants are crowded and generally not serving their normal menus. This was not the case in this situation! I enter the restaurant to meet friends and am actually shocked to find this popular restaurant right in the heart of “the city” completely empty with the exception of a few people at the bar and a couple nuzzled in the corner. Behind a beaded curtain is a large private party of approximately 20 people.
I join my friends and we each order drinks; Sangria, White Cosmos, and a beer. The drinks straggle in, one after the other, as if each has been ordered individually. The server is very pleasant and leaves menus. Of course I am aware that it is restaurant week, but if my friends didn’t tell me that this was a “participating” restaurant, how would I know? What were the rules? Our server never explained until 10 minutes later when she reappeared to take the orders. They were offering a wonderful deal, actually. For $35, they offered one each, appetizer, soup or salad, entree and dessert from their regular menu.
That would be great, except that for the fact that 4 people were dining, so that meant 16 dishes were delivered to our table, eventually, and perhaps 6 of them were edible. The tuna tartar was well seasoned, but the crisps served with it were so greasy that grease literally coated my fingertips when I went to pick one up. My Grilled Caesar Salad was not grilled, instead it was an ice cold Caesar, you know, the kind that has been sitting pre-made in the refrigerator all day. My medium rare burger was beyond well done to the point of being burnt. A friend’s salmon was raw. Not medium-rare, my friends, raw! The desserts were not good at all, but the worst culprit was the bread pudding which had been burned beyond recognition. (Unfortunately, my camera battery died before I could get a good picture of that!)
The service was just non-existent all night. There was no option to complain or return the problem dishes because there was no one around. Dishes were delivered and our server was gone before we could look up. It took us a long time, and I guess it was because we were just too busy talking to care, to realize that the large party was the problem.
Long story to get to the point, which is this:
If a restaurant has pre-booked a large party, then they should plan appropriately. It really isn’t that difficult of a concept to figure out. They know in advance that they had 20 people scheduled for dinner. Why were there no other servers scheduled for the dining room during restaurant week? Why would the kitchen be so slammed that they would literally be burning food because of the chaos this party created? What would have happened if the dining room had actually been busy?
Again, if a restaurant is empty, there is usually a good reason for it. I guess we were the last to know in this case….
How did you handle the disappointing food and service? Did you complain,return food, and/or leave a bad tip or all of the above?
How did you handle the disappointing food and service? Did you complain,return food, and/or leave a bad tip or all of the above?
There was no returning food because the server literally dropped the plates and ran, never to be seen again. To be honest, we were so disappointed by the meal that we plotted our quick departure and a first visit to Village Whiskey. I’m really not sure what happened next because we got so excited at the prospect of hitting the bar that we flew out of there.
The restaurant did lose its BEST OF status, I do know that! We don’t mess around…
There was no returning food because the server literally dropped the plates and ran, never to be seen again. To be honest, we were so disappointed by the meal that we plotted our quick departure and a first visit to Village Whiskey. I’m really not sure what happened next because we got so excited at the prospect of hitting the bar that we flew out of there.
The restaurant did lose its BEST OF status, I do know that! We don’t mess around…