Let me start with the fact that my wife and I love Hudson House Lakewood so much. The food, drinks, and ambience are tremendous. We equate this to a Hillstones or even R&D Cafe, but closer to where we live (Lake Highlands).
There's a range of variety of food across a range of price points. Their entree salads are giant. Their chicken is tender and delicious. Their burgers are great. There's never been anything we haven't enjoyed, including drinks.
The ambience is a sunny, East Coast coast old world (1940-1950s) that has been modernized through decor, design, and art. There's a lot of brass fixtures, nods to old world bar/restaurants. And yet their artwork is like a modern art museum.
Service - We always enjoy everyone who serves us. You can tell these are full-time professional servers who have done this for a living. There are some regular servers we see, but most often the faces we see each time are newer or familiar. Perhaps their server staff is just that big, or perhaps there's some turnover at this location. It's hard to say.
However, my biggest gripe about Hudson House is that the commercial aspects of the business are something we'd heard from staff regularly. For example, I've been told numerous times about the reservations, numbers of seats, time limit of the reservation, etc. This hasn't been a one-off. I've had this come up from multiple servers and at least two hosts.
One time with a party of 3 adults and two children, the server told us technically they would see this size as 5 seats for ordering, implying that small children don't bring revenue.
Just last night: We had a host offer us a table of 6 but told us we'd only have 60 minutes to stay there. Thankfully we had a reservation for 4 already. The email reservation mentioned all reservations are for 90 minutes. I've never had a restaurant that so put this in the customers face.
It's clear Vandelay management hammers these servers and hosts with the commercials, but customers really shouldn't be privy to the fact that they have a 90 min time limit - especially at a higher-end restaurant like Hudson House.
Hillstones hurries you along, brings you the check ASAP, but it's sort of implied / unstated. Hudson House Lakewood actually talks about some of these behind-the-scenes commercial aspects to its customers, which is off-putting. read more