Starting off I'd like to preface this review that I normally do not like to leave negative reviews and am not typically critical of restaurants. I understand how it feels to be in a customer service facing role and I know it's hard and people can be demanding sometimes..
But I would give this place a zero if I could.
I had made a reservation for an event for 6 people in the beginning of the week , on a Monday.
The morning of the event, 2 people were not able to make it. I had updated the restaurant of the change in the number of people who would be attending the event.
When I got there, they were confused about my reservation and finally found it utilizing my phone number.
Then, one of the waitresses redirected me to the outside in the back to a tent. It was a dirty tent with cheap plastic chairs and tables. She told me that there was no room inside for my party to be seated.
How is this possible? I had made the reservations on Monday. The only thing that changed was that 2 people were not able to make it. Beirut did an extremely poor job of managing our reservation.
After sitting outside in this dirty, dingy tent in under 50 degree weather, I came back inside and let the manager know of my reservation and how I made this reservation on a Monday, why are they not able to accommodate me? I gave them a weeks notice.
He told me there might be a 40-50 minute wait, but immediately changed it to two minutes once I told him how I had made this reservation way in advance.
We finally get seated at a table, and then I let the waitress attending to us , know we are waiting for 2 other people , so it will be 4 people in total. Throughout the night this waitress would walk away while I was in the middle of speaking to her. We put in our orders and the items took so long to come out.
The cups we had were dirty and full of dust and fingerprints. when we pointed it out to the waitress, she was very irritated she had to replace them. We also only had two sets of utensils, and 4 people. We kept asking for utensils and didn't receive them.
Obviously we were irritated because I had told the waitress there would be 4 people in total, and she had only set up the table with two sets of utensils.
This was extremely embarrassing because we were with two people we were meeting for the first time, and this was slowly turning out to be a horrible experience.
My friend was so upset she decided to speak to management about it. She discussed her concerns about the waitress and the situation in general that day , and the manager was very aggressive and disrespectful to her.
He was not listening to her concerns, and basically kept asking her what she wanted from him, as if we were trying to ask for freebies/free services in compensation for what had happened.
This was not the case at all. We just wanted him to understand that we were just asking for the bare minimum, which was for utensils, a waitress who didn't walk out on us while we were speaking and clean cups and glasses to drink out of.
He said he would take care of it in an irritated and disrespectful tone to my friend and then lingered over us watching our table making us very uncomfortable. This was not the case, and he did not take care of anything. Except taking care to make us uncomfortable.
The waitress overheard how the manager was behaving with our friend, and felt justified to then come over and tell my friend " you have a lot of complaints and that she complained a lot" and basically asked what more does my friend want from her?
She finally gave us the other two sets of utensils. We uncomfortably finished our meal. At the end,they charged us a whopping 18% gratuity automatically added to the bill.
We paid and left, as we did not want to cause a scene.
Beirut was a favorite of ours and that is why we had initially decided to have our small event there. They failed to manage our reservation, failed to provide us with clean and sufficient amount of utensils/ drink ware. The staff was disrespectful and we are extremely disappointed in this restaurant.
I highly recommend you look for a different restaurant for your next event. Management does not care about the concerns of their customers, and finds them problematic when they voice their concerns, and disrespects them to the highest extent. read more