I'm well past due on leaving this review, but I still feel the need to leave our review from our visit for my fiances birthday this past fall. As they didn't take reservations we made sure to show up early as we had a group of 10 or so. We quickly put our name on the list, saw the place was busy, and also realized we were behind a group of the same size that appeared very agitated that they were still waiting to be sat. We hopped over and grabbed some drinks at the bar next door Volstead and listened to some music for about 20 minutes before coming back into the restaurant area. We saw that the restaurant was starting to clear out, but noticed the group in front of us was still waiting to be sat as well - which got us a little nervous. The workers kept telling us not to worry we'd be sat shortly.
So we waited, and waited, and waited. We waited well over an hour and a half to be sat for dinner. We watched as many tables became available due to how late it was now getting and were never once talked to about maybe splitting our group up into separate tables so we could be sat and eat. We eventually asked why the delay and were told that there was a group sitting at the table they were planning on putting us at and that they had paid but had not left yet. We pushed back on them to ask them to head to the bar as they had a group waiting and they basically said they weren't going to do that. Eventually this group left and we were able to be sat, at this point half of our group had to leave as they had kids and needed to get home. About half of our group remained, our server wasn't very interested in us at this point, which just made this experience that much worse. We had our orders ready to go once we were sat, because at this point it's almost two hours we've been waiting. Once our orders were taken that was about the last we saw of our server until he dropped off the bills (which weren't correct the first or second time they were brought). No check to see how our food was, no check to see if we wanted more drinks (spoiler alert: it was a birthday, and we had just waited two hours for food, of course we wanted drinks) it was truly awful.
Now I've worked in the industry for a long time, I know what it's like to have tables like us, tables that are frustrated at a long wait, poor service and clear lack of organization. However, we were prepared, we came early in anticipation of our larger group and had we been asked to split up into separate tables so we could've been served faster we absolutely would have. We were annoyed at the restaurants lack of initiative in asking the previous table to move to the bar, etc. so we could be sat. We were annoyed at the lack of really anything with the staff, there was no effort to apologize, try to explain, etc. This is a common practice when dealing with busy nights. It was just exhausting and honestly ruined the birthday.
On a final and better note, the food and drinks were good. However, after the experience we all left agreeing we wouldn't be back. Will we stop by Volstead for drinks? Absolutely. Will we be eating at Burgers and Bottles? Absolutely not and probably not recommending them to anyone else unfortunately. read more