My family and I are in town on vacation and wanted to eat at a local place. River City Cafe seemed to have a great vibe and the menu online looked like it had some great burger options. Google said they closed at 10pm we arrived at about 8:35/8:40pm. They were busy when we arrived and were told it could be 30minute wait. We were seated after about 20 minutes to an outdoor table. That's when it all went downhill. We were given our menus when seated, but that is the last we saw of anyone at our table. Other tables around us were being served, cleared off, checked on, given refills on beverages, while we just sat there. No server, no one coming to take our order, none of the other workers even acknowledged that we were sitting there twiddling our thumbs without even a drink. I tried waving down another server, but wasn't seen. After at least 20 minutes I finally got up and went to the front desk and asked the host if a server had been assigned to our table. He apologized then went and got our server. She came out immediately and seemed to be in a good mood. Asked if we wanted to get drinks, we told her we were ready to order our meals (after all , we had sat for 20+ minutes at this point). Dee kindly took our orders. Then brought us our drinks. We then waited over 35 minutes for our meal to come out. During this time, we were never visited to see if we needed drink refills, or to let us know that the kitchen was busy and that our food was coming soon. Finally our food came out. She got my husband a refill (he had to ask, she did not offer) and then we didn't see her again outside (I could see here waiting on a couple tables inside the building, but she never came outside to check on us). A few minutes after our food arrived my daughter noticed that none of our meals came with the slaw. We were not told it wouldn't be coming and were not given the option to get something else instead. I tried to wave down other servers since ours was MIA, but was ignored. I finally shouted out to another server to see if she could check. She did go to the kitchen to see, but only told us they ran out, and didn't give us the option to get something else in it's place. She also seemed annoyed that she had to answer our question and didn't apologize that we didn't get everything we were paying for. We finished eating, I needed a refill but never got one (I got the jalepeno burger and it was very spicy, without a refill...I decided to only eat half and take the rest home). Since I now needed to take home my burger, I needed our server to bring me a box. At this point, every other customer had left and we were completely on our own outside. No servers, no customers, no host. We waited for about 10 more minutes hoping someone would see us out the window or come out to clean off the other tables, still NOTHING! I finally got up to go inside to get someone (we honestly considered just leaving since they didn't seem to care about us anyway, but our conscience wouldn't allow us to do so). Low and behold our server was coming out just as I was heading in. But she didn't seem like she had even remembered that we were there, it seemed like she was just coming out to clear off other tables or something. She got me the box, brought us our bill. I checked the #s, but the total seemed high (but didn't do the math in my head - felt rushed by the server since it was at least 10 minutes past closing time). We paid the bill and left. Got to the car and my son did the quick math for me and we must've been charged a credit card fee??? I know that is common now, but I didn't see it posted anywhere nor were we told there would be an added fee.
This was our first and last time at this establishment. There were many great reviews, so maybe we just had a bad experience, but it was multiple bad experiences all in one night. Guests should NEVER be ignored. read more