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| - Never again. This is a terrible place for anybody looking to enjoy themselves. If having fun is not your thing, check out Fat City.
My second time here confirmed in spades the general feeling of badness I got the first visit. The first time (~a year ago) was a weekend night and they had a lot of people. All the garbage that comes with a large, half and half campusy crowd was there that time. They had keg service outside in a busted little shed (plastic cups, long lines, beer foam splashing all over, and a full compliment of asshats).
Inside, the place doesn't *look* that bad. They have dark wood accents, a selection of booths, tables, and a long bar. They have 2 nice pool tables, a shuffle puck table (you dont have to pay for the machine to keep score ... there's an app for that now), a new golden tee, and a couple of other games that looked playable.
The second time I went was a Tuesday night. I realize Tuesday is a polarizing night for bars, but I am solidly in the camp of lovers of bars on the empty side. A group of grad students I run with had called ahead letting the place know we would be coming en masse. Many of this crew refused to come, (I surmise based upon how terrible this bar is). So we had about 80 less people there than we warned them about ahead of time. So the service was great, right? Nope. The worst I've experienced in Champaign-Urbana.
Drinks took literally 20 minutes. One bartender with ADHD had "a system" for remembering what everybody had was running around like a chicken with his head cut off. The guy was really trying, but he did not do his job efficiently at all: he would ask you what you wanted, listen to the very first thing you said, then turn away and 'get right on it' before you were done talking. He would then stop preparing your drink order mid-way to take care of somebody else and their extended family. He would then serve up your drink and act like you were the jerk because you wanted two additional drinks. Those three drinks will cost you $9 plus 20-35 minutes of your life. This 'system' led to a half-dozen or more people at any given time stuck in the purgatory between ordering a drink(s), receiving said drink(s) and paying for same.
The music system sucks. A really muddy sound that makes old standards hardly understandishable, and the bar artificially loud. In the nearly empty bar described above, it was hard to hear even those near to you, and doubly hard to communicate with the bartender. It was easier to hear elsewhere, but they must put the speakers over the bar (so the bartender can't hear complaints?).
The food sucks. Terrible selection of boring pub grub standards of BBQ'd meat, fried meat, crappy frozen crinkle cut fries. On Tuesday, they have $2.00 margaritas that are TERRIBLE. Bottom-shelf tequila plus too-much bottom shelf margarita mix over ice (no blend option).
Oh yeah, there is an old guy sitting at the end of the bar talking loudly to himself. The aforementioned sound quality makes this even creepier, as only occasional strains of his soliloquy find their way through the muddy garbage music they play here (Classic Rawk 2 steps below NOW!).
I really thought about giving this place 2 stars for the following reasons: $4 bottles of good beers, (like Rogue Dead Guy and Bell's Oberon) and a shuffle puck table/new Golden Tee. Pre-Yelping the place in my head I was resigned to give them 2 stars as a recognition of such efforts, even if they were not reflected in positive results. Then my buddy got his Blue Moon draft in a plastic cup.
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