Let me start by saying this is the first time I've ever posted a review of a restaurant. I've never felt so compelled to before. My wife and I go out to eat quite a bit, and we've sat at a good number of bars at restaurants; usually you get much better, more attentive and friendly service. We have never been ignored the way we were ignored at the bar here recently.
Richard's definitely has a reputation of catering to their regulars, just read some of the comments here. And we've seen this with our own eyes before, but never quite this bad. We probably come every 3-4 months or so, so we are definitely not regulars. We don't live in the immediate area. For the one hour and 15 minutes we were here, I observed quite a bit of what was going on around us. Lots of regulars who all got greeted quickly and warmly with a bowl of popcorn, got asked if they wanted another beverage or anything else. We had to ask for popcorn. We also got one menu, and were told "here, in case you decide to order food."
We ordered our drinks and then our food, which did come pretty quickly I have to say. I will also say the bartender who took our order and brought our food was the best of the bunch; after that it completely fell apart. I sat with an empty drink glass in front of me at the edge of the bar for a good 20-25 minutes. During that time, I observed all of the five bartenders kind of walking around, talking to each other, or doing whatever. It was busy, but it wasn't crazy by any means. Each one of them walked by us several times and never acknowledged the empty glass in front of me. They also never checked on us, asked how our food was, asked if we needed anything. We were literally just forgotten about the entire time after getting our food. I have never seen this happen in a restaurant before. First rule of bartending is no empty glasses, right? What was more frustrating was watching all of the regulars around us who the bartenders knew by name, getting their drinks or second drinks without even asking for them. All I wanted was another drink. Even the glass of water that I had was near the bottom, and I never got asked if I wanted more.
I decided not to try and flag someone down myself, it was an experiment at that point to see if anybody would acknowledge me. Sadly, they did not. I did flag one of them down just to get my bill to pay it and get out of there as quickly as possible. It's too bad, because we love the food at Richard's. But we will never sit at that bar again. They go out of their way to make non-regulars feel out of place and unwelcome. read more