Dined on 28 September 2024
- Overall 4
- Food 5
- Service 5
- Ambience 3
The food was great, the food service was fine (albeit almost a little too fast, at times) – unfortunately, the reservation or, rather, how it was handled, was not.
We had specifically reserved a table upstairs, in hopes of being a little more removed from the "traffic" on an expectedly busy Saturday evening.
When we arrived at the restaurant to claim our reservation, we first had to wait several minutes while two of the hostesses helped people who arrived after us, twice. After we were finally noticed, I informed the hostess about our reservation, only to have her turn away and speak to yet another guest, again for several minutes. When she finally got back to me, she asked again what she could do for me.
When we were finally shown to our table, not only was it not upstairs, but it was easily the worst table in the house (one which frankly shouldn’t even exist in that space), placed right at the stairs and overlapping another, much larger table in very close proximity. In effect, one of our party of 4 was sitting halfway in front of the staircase, frequently being brushed up against by guests and servers walking up or down the stairs. And another was inevitably blocking at least two people at the neighboring table from getting up.
As soon as we realized this, I approached the hostess again and told her that we had actually reserved a table upstairs, and that the table she gave us was really not ideal. She apologized for the inconvenience, but said outright that they had (apparently deliberately) overbooked and that there were no more tables available upstairs.
Now, a) I would claim that your booking policy generally shouldn’t prioritize optimizing the restaurant‘s turnover over the guest’s experience, and b) all of this was not exactly made better by the fact that – seated directly by the stairs as we were – we witnessed at least 3 new parties arriving no more than 10-15 minutes after we did being seated upstairs.
All in all, not a great experience.
