| rev:text
| - St. Patrick's Day and after a day of work and night at the gym I wanted to go out and get an order of corned beef & cabbage and a Guinness. After two failed attempts at other establishments (one $10 per person to get in and the second closed the kitchen at 8) I called O'Brien's. I was impressed that they answered the phone, it sounded quiet in the background, and their kitchen was open until 12.
It is right behind the Fiesta Mall and had plenty of parking. When I walked in it was spacious and although there were several people it was not too busy - and it was quiet. We sat down at 9:20 in the bar area. There was a guy cleaning tables beside us and two servers that walked by multiple times. The hostess came in, gave someone a menu, and left. We still waited.
I looked at everyone as they waited on surrounding tables or walked by, yet we went unacknowledged. I stopped someone and asked if we could get a minute. We finally received one and it was some minutes before the server came to our table. When she did she said "oh wait - let me get some paper to write down your order". She returned quickly and wrote down the corned beef & cabbage, a Guinness, and lemonade.
We waited, and waited, and waited some more. I was growing increasingly impatient. I saw her occasionally walking around, yet we still had no drink. 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Still no drink. I understand the food would take longer, but the drinks? I looked at their clock and it said 8:57. I stopped a different server walking by told her I was five minutes from walking out. She asked why and I informed her we still didn't have drinks.
A guy came up, apologized and I said whatever - I am leaving in three minutes. He asked what we ordered. I said apparently a time consuming lemonade and Guinness because we can't seem to get one in under a half hour. He looked shocked and asked what food we ordered. He apologized and said he would check on it. I reminded him he was down to two minutes and I didn't care what he did with it.
He did hustle and brought the lemonade and Guinness, and apologized. Then he went into the back and immediately returned with a plate of corned beef and cabbage. We had also at some point added mozzarella sticks and he returned a couple of minutes later with those. Our original server came by and she said "oh, sorry" and asked if she could get anything else for us. I said how about a second set of silverware. She said okay, but we never did see that surface.
Another server stopped by, apologized and said "there have been a lot of mix-ups tonight". She said the manager would stop by and talk to us, but he was with someone else right now. The helpful male server stopped by again to see if we needed anything, and the manager showed up at the same time. He dropped off another Guinness and lemonade that must have been from the kid's menu. I told him I didn't think I would drink that other beer. He said "try", then he walked the male server to the side and asked where we came from....meaning whose table did he take over. Then he said something about taking the food and someone had been waiting for something for a long time - it sounded like he was getting in trouble for helping out. Maybe he took someone else's food. I don't know what their story was, and sorry I we ate your food.
The manager never did speak to us other than giving us the free drinks we didn't want. They did not take anything off the bill - the corned beef, the cheese sticks, lemonade, and Guinness came to $26.45. We also never received the second set of silverware.
I understand it is St. Patrick's Day and most places are crazy busy. This was not that busy and had sufficient staff coverage. For an Irish bar this is your Black Friday. You have one day that you are really busy and need to be at the top of your game. This was far from it. The food was good, but the service (except for the one guy who eventually got talked to) was horrible. It was slow and I was getting annoyed before it really was slow and I was annoyed. It should not take that long to get a menu, and then drinks should be immediate - not 40 minutes.
I appreciate the server who tried to help, even if he got in trouble. Even though the food was good, I will never go back to that business. If someone were to take my dead body and put it in the restaurant I would turn into a zombie if nothing more than to walk out of there.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)