It's Red Robin. I'm not expecting excellence. I'm expecting basic functionality. Somehow that was a…read morebridge too far.
We came in as a group of five and asked for a booth that seats five. One hostess checked and said yes. A different guy then grabbed five menus plus a kids menu, walked us back, and dropped them at a tiny four top even though multiple correct size booths were empty. Five people, six menus, four seats. He did not pause or wait to see if we could even sit.
I walked back up to the front and told the hostess again that we were five people. I told her we had just been seated at a table that only seats four and that the booth directly next to it, the one that actually seats five, was dirty. She insisted without looking that we were at the right table.
We walked back together. It was immediately obvious that the table we had been seated at only sat four people. Instead of just fixing it, she immediately moved on to arguing that the larger table was not dirty.
It was dirty. The table was visibly covered in crumbs. When I asked for it to be wiped down, she said the crumbs were "nicks in the wood." They were not. You could see the crumbs and even the shadows they cast. To demonstrate her point, she pressed a finger into one of these supposed nicks, which instantly broke apart into 47 smaller, more spread out crumbs. A bold strategy.
Even after that, she still did not wipe the table. She knocked the crumbs that she had further crumbled by trying to make her point off the table with her hand and instead of wioing the table clean, she pointed out three actual nicks in the table, as if that changed the fact that there were still crumbs everywhere. I pointed out more crumbs that were very clearly still crumbs and all over the table and asked again if someone can please just wipe the table with something besides their hand. Only then did she wipe the table, the fourth time I had asked.
She brushed crumbs off the table with her hand, knocking them down onto the booth seats, and then wiped the table with a wet rag pulled from a dirty communal bin. The table was even stickier afterward. The booth seats were already sticky and still had straw wrappers from whoever had been sitting there before us, so now the crumbs from the table were stuck on the seats too. At least everything matched.
Service stayed chaotic. Several drinks were wrong due to empty syrups. We ordered two orders of pretzel bites, but only one came out, so we had to ask and wait for the second. When they did arrive, they tasted mostly butter glazed (correct flavor) but also oddly like they had picked up a teriyaki (incorrect) flavor which made me wonder if there was some sauce mixing or cross contamination happening in the kitchen.
While we were already waiting a long time for our food, the server came by just to tell us that there had been an extra order of pretzel bites, that the staff ate them, and that they were really good. This was especially strange information to share while we were still sitting there waiting and to be fair, she did preface saying all this by saying, 'this might not be something you need to know', but what made it especially odd was considering that we had ordered two orders of pretzel bites, only received one initially, and had to ask and wait for the second. Do the math. I'm glad our server and the staff enjoyed how good our "extra" pretzel bites were.
Food eventually arrived. We were reminded that Red Robin has bottomless sides, the entire reason people go there, and then both of our servers disappeared for the next 35 minutes. We had a regular server and a server in training. Neither one came back.
Every single person at the table, adults, teens, and a kid, finished every bite of food. Plates, cups, wrappers, and trash were stacked at the end of the table because we had been sitting there for so long with no refills, no sides, and no check ins. Every single person wanted more fries or sides and could not get them because no one came back. Especially annoying since now the portion of the side that comes with your meal is so much smaller than it used to be.
We eventually paid on the tabletop kiosk because it was clear we had been abandoned.
When one of the servers finally reappeared, we were already scooting out of the booth with our coats on to leave, with everything piled at the end of the table. She said, "Wow, you guys were fast." I responded plainly that she never came back and had been gone for a long time. This was not us rushing. This was a table being abandoned.
She offered sides to go. We were already leaving and not interested in waiting any longer for something that should have happened during the meal. She said "okay" and walked away. Honestly, A for apathy. Object permanence does not appear to be a core competency here.
I'm not mad. I'm impressed. It's not easy to consistently miss the bare minimum while doubling down every time, but this place pulled it off. And with not a single sorry.
