My wife and I just visited this place. Our experience at The Drift was that it had good atmosphere,…read moreand good food. However, the level of service we received was astonishingly poor.
We were in shortly after noon on Sunday. There were perhaps a dozen, possibly 15 other patrons in the establishment. After choosing a booth to sit in we were greeted and given water. A few minutes later we placed our orders. Everything had been perfectly fine up to this point. We began waiting for our food to arrive. 20 minutes went by, then 25... then 30 minutes. Anyway, I begin looking around, trying to make eye contact with our server (who, mind you, has not stopped by one single time since taking our order over 30 minutes earlier). This is a very small restaurant, and all patrons are seated in a single room. It wasn't as though we were tucked away in some easy-to-overlook spot. Eventually, around the 35-40 minute mark, we saw our server look at us, then at her notepad, then at the POS. The expression on her face confirmed the obvious: she'd never sent our order to the kitchen.
The thing to do in this instance would have been to immediately come to our table, apologize for the extremely long ticket time, explain what had happened, assure us that the kitchen has been made aware of our order, and promise that our food will be out very shortly.
That would've completely solved the problem.
However, that's not at all what our server did at all. Instead, she proceeded to make every possible effort to avoid all eye contact with us, and walked right by us (1 foot away) about 7 or 8 times without ever saying a single word. My wife even said "Excuse me..." during one of those passes, but of course she continued walking right by us. We were flabbergasted. From a customer service standpoint, what was happening was truly absurd.
It's no exaggeration to say that we've dined in hundreds of restaurants over the last few years, all over the country. We've enjoyed meals at the greasiest diners, the finest steakhouses, and absolutely everything in between. It's also no exaggeration to say that the service we experienced at The Drift was, without question, The Worst that we've encountered.
There were a couple/few other, lesser issues with the service as well, but this review is already plenty long.
I wish them the best, because small towns need places like this with elevated creative menus, hip, updated vibes, etc. My suggestion would be train the servers! We really liked what the restaurant/tap house has going on in a few categories, and there's tons of potential for it to become an amazing place, but the service MUST improve.