For an excellent, authentic dining experience in the Hotel Zone, might I suggest Xkat-la. Its only a couple minutes down the road.
Fred's is a complete joke. For some reason this restaurant tries so hard to be American, but in fact it does a disservice to American chain restaurants. You will receive better, honest service at a Chili's in the States.
This restaurant is dishonest, completely overdone, overpriced, and over engineered. There are more people standing around 'working' there than there are patrons. With that, one would expect great service, which sadly is not the case.
After our hostess gave us an entirely too formal, over the top introduction to our server, a random person we were not introduced to asks if we would like something to drink. There was no drink menu and there was immediate pressure to place an order. My friend ordered a pina colada, and to save time and brain power I ordered the same. We were then asked what kind of rum we wanted - when replying we do not care, this random additional person taking our drink order was visibly annoyed by this response. Turns out this person was not a bartender, but a 'mixologist', who in my opinion should be the rum expert, not I.
Things really start to get fun when we're reunited with our server to place our food order. She immediately gave us today's specials and really talked them up. One of the items was lobster presented in a wooden box. (You're supposed to be impressed) I wasn't starving, and also wasn't dazzled by the specials so I ordered the grilled fish fillet. The server did not like that at all. She tried to talk me out of ordering it no fewer than 3 times, to which she kept saying how small it is. The small size was just what I was looking for, so I actually won this round and ordered what I wanted. Until....
I asked for a side order of fries to go with it, in which my friend chimes in and says me too. The server tells us they don't have fries. This is where you, the reader, can choose your own adventure and look up the menu yourself to solve this mystery, or stay here and keep reading.
Spoiler alert, there are Fish & Chips, as well as two different types of Lobster Rolls on the menu that are served with fries. Naturally I mention 'But you sell fish and chips, there are fries on the menu'. This is where it gets really good. She quickly replies with 'Those are for decoration' DECORATION. What does that even mean? My instinct was to laugh, my friend however was not amused and proceeded to tell her how ridiculous that was. She ultimately said she would need to ask for her 'captain's approval'.
Well we received captain's approval for the salacious orders of fries and we should be thanking her at that point by the way she explained it to us.
Later on during this ordeal, the server came back to apologize for telling us they didn't sell fries. It was all very awkward, apologizing for being caught in a lie.
One of the many captain's standing around came over to ask how we were doing at one point, tried to make small talk, but the fakeness exuding from this person and the others working there is nauseating and a complete turn-off.
This was by far the grossest restaurant experience I've ever had. The crooked way they try to talk you into spending more money with the specials, and the blatant lies were flat out disgusting.
After the fact I realized this restaurant is part of a restaurant group, so you could also eliminate the following restaurants from your list:
Porteno
H Roof
Ilios
Mantela
Bak
Porfirios
Harrys
Nicoletta
La Vicenta
El Squid Roe
Carlos N Charlies
Cao
H Moonlight
Senor Frogs
Erizo
If you made it this far, I gave 1 star for the food. Nothing we ordered tasted bad. read more