This was one of the two worst dining experiences of my life, and it was not because of the food. This place is an examplar of how people - their attitudes and behaviors - can make or break a restaurant.
I was visiting the Atlanta area from out-of-town. I've spent a lot of time in the Caribbean, so I was intrigued to find a Caribbean restaurant right across the street from my hotel.
I sat at the outside bar. The covered seating area outside was beautiful and reminded me of restaurants I've eaten at in Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados, and Jamaica. A steel pan musician was playing beautiful music. So far, so good.
The bar area was not very crowded. When I sat down, I waited for the bartender to look up at me, say hello, and get me a drink and a menu. It took much longer than necessary for that to happen. A lot of times if a bartender is busy, he or she might look up and say - "hi, I'll be there in a couple minutes" or something like that. This one just ignored me and made me wait too long.
While I waited for the bartender to approach me, I turned around and watched the steel pan player. I'm used to watching pan in the Caribbean, where the people tend to be friendly and animated. This guy never looked up at the audience, never engaged with the people, and the audience never clapped. It was technically competent music without any soul.
As I watched the music, I noticed that a bar area about 7-8 feet across from the main bar was accumulating dishes. Every time somebody ate in that area, nobody came to pick up the dirty dishes, so the patrons (understandably) would push their dishes to the side and the pile of dirty dishes kept growing. The entire time I was there (about 1.5 hours), nobody ever came to get those dirty dishes.
The bartender finally got me a drink and took my order. The drinks and the food were both good and I had no complaints. After my meal, I turned around again to watch the musician and do some people-watching. That is when the real service deficits of this place started to reveal themselves.
A waittress walked right in front of me and dropped a plastic cup filled with ice water, soaking the pants and shoes of a customer standing next to me. She apologized to him, and went back to the bar to fill another cup with water. While she was doing that, she told the customer she would be right back with a towel for him and to clean up the ice. She literally never came back. He was angry and left the bar.
Nobody picked up the ice on the floor and eventually it melted. When you spill a drink on a customer, your first priority should be that customer, not getting a new drink. And not to come back at all to clean up the mess - that is just shocking.
In a moment of bizarre deja vu, about 20 minutes later, another waittress was walking by me carrying a glass filled with soda. The bottom of the glass, which must have been cracked, just fell out, spilling soda on the shoes and legs of a customer standing next to her. More importantly, when the glass broke, it sent shards of broken glass and ice cubes to the floor.
The waittress apologized to the customer and did the exact same thing as her colleague, filling up a new glass of soda and walking away. She didn't clean up the customer or the floor - and most importantly, she walked away and left shards of broken glass all over the floor. Do they practice this stuff? Synchronized bad service?
After about 10 minutes went by, I called the bartender over and told him there was broken glass all over the floor and that I was worried someone wearing sandals would cut themselves. His nonchalant response made it seem like I was bothering him, and only after about 5 minutes did he finally call over to a waittress and ask if there was still glass on the floor. She said no and that was the end of it. Shortly after that, I saw a parent walking a toddler by the area, and the kid bent over and touched the floor near the glass - so I jumped up and picked up all the broken glass myself.
At that point I decided I had observed enough shockingly bad service at Bahama Breeze and went on my way.
Isolated instances of bad service are to be expected. Here there is a pattern of bad service that reflects a management failure. Don't reward them for their bad service - take your business elsewhere. read more