Hands down one of the worst restaurant experiences I've ever had. I came here with my mum and stepdad since we were hoping to find a decent place to have a drink on a patio and a casual dinner, and to be honest the pickings are really, really slim in Port Dalhousie. The Kilt always looks lively and fun, and their patio is in a prime spot near the marina. Seemed like a no-brainer to come here on a beautiful spring evening.
However our experience was awful. While our server was prompt and friendly at first, as soon as we had our initial drinks in hand things started to go downhill fast. We all ordered the steak special and I ordered a Cesar salad to start--without bacon since I'm allergic to pork. The salad arrived fast enough but was obviously not without bacon. The waitress said, "Cesar salad without bacon," as she set it down, so she obviously remembered my request, but I'm not sure how she failed to notice it was covered in the stuff. I apologized and sent it back, and she was great about replacing it with a new salad right away. However she blamed the mistake on "the new guy in the kitchen," which I'm not sure I liked. Mistakes happen but it's never a good thing to sell your staff down the river to save face. Especially when it's the server's job to make sure they're taking out the right order from the kitchen as a last line of defence (though to be fair it's also the fault of whomever didn't expedite orders properly in the kitchen too).
And then we proceeded to wait for our mains. And wait. and wait. After an hour my stepdad asked when our food might be arriving, and our server just said she was staying on top of them in the kitchen. Which... if your customers are waiting over an hour for their orders, you obviously need to relearn the meaning of "staying on top of the kitchen," or you're flat-out lying to your customers. Yes, the place was busy, but there didn't seem to be any shortage of servers going around for them to be in the weeds, and most of the tables seemed to be drinking, not eating, for there to be a huge backlog of orders in the kitchen. Whatever the case someone was horribly failing to do their job.
After twenty minutes more, my stepdad got up *again* to go tell them we wanted to get the bill for our drinks and leave, since by now we were in no mood to actually enjoy the food if it ever came (to remotely make up for the wait, it would have had to be the best steak I'd ever eaten at that point, which I knew wasn't going to happen for $9), our server said our food was miraculously ready to go right then! Like a miracle! Hot off the grill AND SO CONVENIENT TOO!!! We reluctantly sat back down, even though I said we should just leave--I found our server's attitude had gotten progressively worse and more unapologetic, like she was annoyed we resented being treated like an afterthought--and then our steaks came out cold, though the plates were hot. Anyone who has worked in the food industry will know this is a dead giveaway that the plates have been sitting under a heat lamp and forgotten about. Certainly it doesn't indicate steaks that have come straight off the grill, which would be sizzling hot if that were the case, not going grey and lukewarm.
Once again the server blamed it on the kitchen staff and brought us our bill, but she wasn't even pretending to be nice to us now, and didn't offer any kind of recompense or even to comp my $5 salad. Nor did she offer to get the manager, and had we not been exhausted and desperate to leave, I would have asked to speak to them myself. (Although it must be asked: what kind of a manager lets 3 main courses get sent back and refunded without coming to investigate the problem? I've never seen something like that happen in a restaurant without being addressed by the person in charge.)
It should go without saying I will never come here again. And neither will my parents, who actually live in Port Dalhousie and might have given them decent business over the summer, since they go out a lot. However the sad thing is I doubt this review or the loss of our business will matter at all to the owners, who clearly make a killing off the student population of St Kits and don't care a whit for its other customers or its reputation. It's a little more reassuring to see I'm not the only one complaining about the service here, but clearly it's a symptom of a bigger problem the owners can't be bothered to address or fix.
Gordon Ramsay would probably swear a lot and maybe throw something, but there's no need. The Kilt isn't even worth that reaction. It's just sad. read more