Went to the Bourbon Street location today with my family for lunch and had the worst service experience in my life, and that's not an exaggeration. The server took a while to greet us, and once we ordered our drinks she took another good while to bring those, even though we could see that her section was not too busy. My husband and I have worked in the service industry for years, and are very understanding when the situation calls for it, as we have both been there, done that. I know when servers are swamped and when they are just plain, bad servers. Anyway, I decided to order brunch and asked her about the pancetta and what other meat I could add to the eggs Benedict, and she said the pancetta was the bread... WTF?! but okay... So I asked her to please make sure before I ordered. She comes back and, as it turns out, "pancetta is bacon" so I decide not to ask any more questions about the food because I wasn't going to get any right answers anyway. After everyone ordered, the food took about 20-25 minutes to arrive. My husband ordered the fettuccine, my brother-in-law ordered a burger, his mom and my sis-in-law got breakfast too, and my nephew got popcorn chicken. Everyone's food came out, but not mine. 10 minutes go by and we still don't see our server--she doesn't check how everyone else's food came out, and no one comes by to give me any idea what is going on with my food. After another 5 minutes I finally get pissed off enough to get up and try to find a manager, and had a hostess tell me she would send someone over right away. A few minutes later a manager comes over with my food in hand, swearing up and down that the server rang it in and the kitchen sent one out, but who knows where that particular dish went cause it definitely didn't come to me.
By now my whole family has finished eating and I tell him that my brother-in-law's mother's food came out cold as well, but with no server in sight for a good while she couldn't even ask for that to get warmed up so she just ate it. He then says, "oh, your potatoes were cold... Would you like some more?" Well no, cause she already ate her cold potatoes as she was hungry and didn't want to wait around.
So I ate my pretty horrible Eggs Benedict, still fuming. It didn't help that the food wasn't any better than the service, but at this point I couldn't expect much anyway. The baguettes my eggs were on were rock hard that I had a hard time even cutting them into bite-sized pieces. Needless to say, I'd lost my appetite at this point and didn't finish the food. My husband ate some of my food after I'd put it off to the side and wasn't impressed at all either.
No one at our table got refills on their drinks while this was all going on, and by now we are all pretty pissed off and can't wait to leave. My brother-in-law came back from the bathroom saying it was a mess in there as well... It seemed like there was nothing this place could do right.
We finally asked for the bill, and the manager returned saying he took care of the entire thing and gave us vouchers to come back so they could "try to make things right." In the end, the effort was appreciated, but I wish it didn't get that far. We could understand if it were a minor mistake, but it seems the whole situation was just a mess from beginning to end. I hate being "that customer" at restaurants because I've served my fair share of those, but I've never experienced anything like that before and I've certainly never given service that badly before in my time as a server! It's a shame that an establishment like that would leave such a bad impression, whether it was the server's fault or the management's for not training their staff correctly. Either way, we will be using the vouchers at another location, simply because we have them, but we will definitely not be returning to the Bourbon Street location ever again. read more