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| - After two visits to this place with mixed results, figured it's time for a Yelp review. Both times on a Monday to take advantage of Happy Hour and free games. For a little background, I'm a recent ASU grad, now work in an office on Mill and am generally a fan of Fork & Dagger's other restaurants, including Canteen and Handlebar.
However, Gringo Star is a big disappointment.
On our first visit, a couple weeks after they opened, everything went relatively well. The food prices are great for the quantity and quality of the food, and everything we tried on the menu was great - the pork tostada, the chicken drumsticks, the tatertots, and especially the fried okra - which is one of my favorite veggies and hardly ever found on AZ menus. For $2, you get a giant basket of the stuff - it's amazing.
We sampled some of the specialty cocktails and really enjoyed the maple whiskey sour and another one that had Mountain Dew (sounded gross, but it was awesome!). Our server wasn't great, forgetting to put in half of the tables order at one point, meaning we waited forever to get our food when our friends already had theirs. Since they were relatively new at the time, we figured it probably would just take some time to iron out the kinks.
I was surprised by how few arcade games they actually had - I've been to similar places back in New York/New Jersey that had way more packed into much less space. Even though this place seems to want to be a "barcade," the focus seems much less on the arcade part. This was made evident by the condition of some of the games - the wait staff hadn't picked up any of the gross old glasses and napkins littering the floor in the arcade area, and when we told our waitress one of the driving games wasn't working, making it impossible to have two-player action, she didn't seem to give a rat's ass. Heaven forbid we actually want to play games on freeplay night, my bad.
After all that, I did however decide to give it another try and meet a girlfriend after work (5:30 p.m.) at the bar. The bartender said it was her first day on the job, but she seemed nice enough, so we tried to be patient. We had to flag her down for EVERYTHING: water, a happy hour menu, a second time so she could bring us the drink list, then when we ordered our drinks and food. Grrrrr.
When we ordered our drinks, I was sad to see they took the Mountain Dew cocktail off the menu, but we decided to give the Princess Peach and the Paint Splatter a try, both of which turned out to be pretty tasty. Our bartender admittedly didn't know how to make either of the drinks, and had to wait to find someone else to help her. I understand not having perfected every drink on the menu, but when there's only about 6 or 7 different cocktails on the menu, how about you train your BARTENDERS how to make them? Servers is one thing, but don't put a girl behind the bar that doesn't know how to make anything.
She then tried to cash us out before our food had even arrived, which I thought was a bit rude. I asked if she had any clue when we might get our food, and she then ran to the kitchen and grabbed us two lukewarm platters - our okra and chicken drumsticks. I got the sinking feeling that it had been sitting back there for a bit since she completely forgot to do any part of her job.
Despite the fact that the place was pretty empty when we got there, the music was so loud by 6 p.m. (on a MONDAY!) that we couldn't even hear each other talk to have a conversation. We weren't the only ones who thought this was annoying, as the group of guys sitting across from us tried to get the bartender to turn it down. She said she didn't know how, so we all were forced to suffer through deafening noise.
We didn't stay long, playing only a bit of skeeball before we just couldn't take it any more. I won't be going back to Gringo Star unless I hear some major improvements happen. This place seems way less quality than Fork & Dagger's other joints, and although they might stay in business when school starts up again just by pandering to Fireball-shot demanding bros, but they're majorly effin it up on being a good place to swing into between 5 and 7 on a weeknight.
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