Rafferty's has been a Memphis staple for a number of years. The service was always great, food…read morealways delicious and it was just an enjoyable spot to dine. My last couple of visits have been "ok", nothing close to the days of old.
Tonight, the restaurant was very busy, almost seemed like an airport - servers coming, going and sometimes seemingly running in questionable circles. The positive, people are dining out and they have chosen your establishment for fulfillment. The negative, if you spend too much time going back and forth to make your food or experience right, it diminishes the experience. We ordered the backyard BBQ burgers, one with fries and one with broccoli. We specifically requested "BBQ sauce on the side", otherwise they slather it in the sauce. In all honesty, the sauce isn't great, but we get it on the side in the event we choose to slightly indulge. Both burgers arrived with the BBQ heavily applied. After waiting and waiting and waiting, the server came back to check in. I wasn't sure if she immediately picked up on the BBQ sauce drenching the burgers or the looks on our faces. Either way, she grabbed the food and went to correct the issue - or so we thought. The server returned minutes later with fresh burgers. Alert...they were the exact same burgers as before. When making the server aware, she assured that the kitchen made the burgers fresh. Alert...remnants of the original BBQ sauce were still present on the burgers. At this point, we ate one of the burgers and barely touched the other. The energy to engage no longer existed. The server graciously :) took one of the burgers off as a gesture of her apology.
I left the server with a bit of advice for the kitchen. When a patron requests an item fixed a certain way or missing a certain ingredient or condiment and you agree to comply, there should be no shortcut. The patron may have a sensitivity or worse, a full blown allergy.
Typically food is love, in this case, it was barely like.