| rev:text
| - Dumpster fire. If you're looking for the quick synopsis, there ya go.
I almost feel bad reviewing this Hooters with all of the other dismal reviews (all of which I can very easily imagine to be 100% correct), because I feel like I am piling on to bully a disabled kid. It really is THAT bad, so bear with me here.
Hooters has been a (quickly ending) Christmas Day tradition for my family and friends for years. Hooters is one of the few places open late for Christmas and by Christmas night, everyone has cabin fever, are tired of leftovers, and just want to get out of the house for beer, wings and football. Due to my family's location in the Lincoln County / Lake Norman area, we have been alternating between the Gastonia and Mooresville locations for years. Gastonia is now out of the equation due to the outright awful food and service.
We arrived and stood in the "lobby" area trying to determine if we needed to wait to be seated. If you're familiar with this location, you know that there isn't much of a lobby area and you basically walk in and are standing very close to other diners at their tables. Sometimes you seat yourself at Hooters. Other times, during busier days (they were moderately busy but not slammed when we arrived), you have to wait to be seated. There wasn't a sign but I figured we probably had to wait to be seated, so we stood there like a couple of dumb asses for 4-5 minutes thinking a hostess would at some point fast rope from the ceiling like a Navy SEAL and seat us. Didn't happen. We came to the conclusion that maybe this was a seat yourself day, and sat ourselves at one of the only available tables in the restaurant (note: there were MANY empty tables, but they were all dirty and had not been cleared).
We sat there for a little over 20 minutes without being greeted. Instead, we received constant dirty looks from the servers that were working our section. I told my buddy that maybe we were supposed to wait to be seated after all [shrug]. This was later confirmed when a couple came in, were immediately greeted and sat by a hostess (WTF? Where did she come from? Maybe she was a Navy SEAL after all!), and quickly received their drinks. We still had not even been greeted.
We saw that a server in another section had noticed us and was talking to the servers in our section, pointing towards us. She was trying to get help for us. They shrugged it off. This server (from the other section) eventually came up to us, told us the servers in our section were busy at the moment (She was being kind. She was busier than they were. Hustling), and said she would go ahead and take our drink order for them. I asked if we had done something wrong to deserve the dirty looks and intentional neglect. She confirmed that yes, we were supposed to have been seated by a hostess. I told her we would gladly get up and wait to be re-seated - that we didn't know. She told us that wasn't necessary.
She put our order in and brought our drinks about 5 minutes later. When it came to ordering food, we still had not been helped by anyone but our stand-in server. I flagged her down and asked if she could just be our server for the rest of the night. She said yes, and from that point the service was excellent. The food, however, was lacking. The wings were cold and took about 45 minutes to come out. Ah well, par for the course. Service continued to be dismal for others around the restaurant. I counted 8 tables at one point that were empty but had not been cleaned. Three of them were in our section, where the servers were "too busy" to help us. Meanwhile, a manager (I think?) was walking around giving out discount cards for our inconvenience that had to be used at a later date (LOL, WUT?! Won't be one), and servers were sitting at tables while nothing else was happening.
A few weeks have passed between our visit and this review (Aka, the "cooling off" period), but I think we paid around $66 for the experience you just read about. I don't want to take anything away from the server that really stepped up and went well out of her way to help us when no one else would. I left her a $100 tip. See what happens when you put good customer service above your petty attitude? Good things.
Note to management: The proper way to deal with customers that unintentionally seat themselves when you have a hostess is to politely inform them that they need to wait to be seated. This may be hard to believe, but we will happily comply. Other restaurants have figured out that signs are awesome for this purpose, but from everything else I saw during this visit, that may be too next level for this Hooters. What I do know is that dirty looks and intentional neglect are typically not great customer service approaches. Anyone at Hooters corporate that just cannot figure out for the life of you why this and other locations are getting absolutely destroyed right now, refer to this review and the many others just like it.
|
![[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)