Now... I have reasonable (in my opinion) expectations of a fast casual option chain like Denny's. I don't expect gourmet or blow-my-mind food. However, this was right next to our hotel, after an extremely long travel day, and it was just out oldest son and I on a house hunting trip so this worked.
Arrival into the restaurant was a precursor for the problems. We were ignored for a few minutes and then sort of greeted and then sort of shown to a booth with menus tossed on the table. The service never got better sadly. They were obviously not fully staffed for the skill set of the servers (not sure if that is normal staffing for this location or not of course), and the servers were annoyed and mad. How do I know that? Because they discussed all of their gripes with the bus boy and the cooks.... loudly.... for the entire hour and a half it took to eat and leave. There were 8 tables, two servers, one busser and two cooks that we saw. Tables fluctuated of course and the most I saw at any one time during our visit was 12.
It took 35 min to get our "breakfast for dinner" options of eggs, hash browns, pancakes for the kiddo, and bacon.
The food was.... fine, I guess. Not great and my omelet was very much underdone (I couldn't eat even half) and my son's "over easy" eggs came out as burnt scrambled eggs (he didn't want me to ask for new ones because he is super shy, so we did not address the issue with the server). The rest was what you expect from Denny's and was fine. The only things we finished was the greasy hash browns lol.
The service is really the biggest issue. Very inappropriate (especially with multiple kiddos in the restaurant) convo between the staff members, multiple times they disappeared and came back and served food with their jackets still on and I have to wonder if they bothered to wash their hands before they came back after a break. More than that- our server basically tossed the menus and the plates and couldn't care less about what we needed or wanted or how the food was. I even had to go up to the counter and ask a new arrival for our check because the other server was just ignoring us.
Next time, I would consider grabbing it to go (although I heard one of the two servers tell the busser to ignore the phone ringing constantly because "it's just someone who wants to order something to go anyways".... literally....).
There were a few other options close enough to walk to, fast food and one steakhouse type place I didn't know. Next time I'd pay for the steakhouse and leave this one off the list. Food is one thing, but bad service (aka rude) is never ok. read more