I honestly suppressed the fact that I came here from my memory. Party of 4 came here on a Friday evening as we were visiting our friend who lives walking distance away.
We sat in the first immediate dining room area. My first impression of this restaurant was that it was absolutely hideous. Extremely dark and dated.
Our server- whose name I can't remember for the life of me (spoiler alert it's because she straight up disappears)- came over pretty promptly at first. We each ordered drinks to start. Everything goes downhill from here, to put it lightly. It takes her FIFTEEN MINUTES to return WITHOUT THE DRINKS??? We all had our menus fully closed and were craning our necks around to look for her. She returned and acted like everything was normal?!?
But- it! Gets! Worse!!!!
We order penne alla vodka, chicken Madeira, a pizza, and a 4th dish I can't remember. Still no drinks- we'd ordered the sangria, 2 beers, and a Moscow mule. 25 minutes after we ordered the drinks, she finally brings 2 of them. The 2 beers, with literally no head at all. Essentially this means the beers were sitting up on the service bar for too long, meaning that our server obviously did not bring them over to us when they were ready and it had nothing to do with the bartender.
Eventually food runners bring our food. It didn't take a crazy amount of time for us to receive that, as it had nothing to do with our server. Howver, I guess everybody that works here is just mediocre because every single dish came out completely ice cold. Why didn't we send it back? Because our server literally was nowhere to be found for the rest of our meal. Literally the WHOLE rest of the time. Mind you, despite our food being cold, I did get pasta and asked for red pepper flakes and Parmesan cheese. Never got that either, server never came back to check on our dishes to see if they were OK- which would've been a good thing since they WERE NOT. I truly have not had worse vodka pasta in my whole entire life. It was so incredibly overcooked on top of being cold which made no sense, did not taste anything- and I mean ANYTHING- like penne vodka. And every single person at the table agreed upon that.
So then we're done eating our horrible food, or at least done eating as much of it as we could stomach. We sit there. We sit there some more. At one point we actually start a timer to see when in the world our server will ever come back, as the last time that she was back was when she brought us drinks over a half hour ago. Eventually our timer reached 17 minutes. Mind you, this is not just 17 minutes after we finish, this is 17 minutes after we decided that she was taking an eternity and wanted to see how long she could possibly take. We are also seated quite close to the host stand. It was extremely obvious that we were looking around. At one point I even stood up and was taking a gander to see if I could spot her, or she could spot me. The host obviously saw us looking. Granted, it's not the host's job to keep tabs on the servers. But when you work in a service industry job and you see customers cleary looking for assistance any self-respecting employee would at least decide to inquire as to why we look so distraught. Not this host though. This host instead was eating chips at the host stand!
Finally, we are so fed up that we decide to commit one of the most annoying things a patron in a restaurant can do: ask the host for the check. The host is like, oh yeah of course sure let me just grab your server. The host acts as if she hasn't been watching us look around for at least 20 minutes, but OK.
The prodigal server returns, and again PRETENDS LIKE EVERYTHING IS FINE AND SHE HASNT BEEN GONE FOR 40 MINS?!?! Literally does not address it at all. Doesn't even ask how the food was, which would have been useful since it was in fact terrible. We give her four credit cards without her even bring us the bill because we are that desperate to get out of there. She brings back three of the four cards and then disappears ONCE AGAIN. Just a whole credit card completely missing. The person whose card it was was so fed up that she approached the other servers and asked if they could help her find it. Confirmed: everybody that works at this restaurant is mediocre. None of the servers decided to help her instead they gave the snide, "why don't you ask your server" and continued on with their own conversation! IF ONLY WE COULD FIND OUR SERVER EVER! We ended up finding the card after she searched without any kind of assistance, or even an apology from anybody for the server losing her card, on her hands and knees with a flashlight, eventually finding it at the bar outside on the ground.
DO. NOT. COME. HERE. Consider yourself warned. read more