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| - After a brief stop in Kensington, D and I stopped at Chili's for lunch because I'd never been before. It was an interesting experience.
We waited at the front reception for someone to notice us and a staff member who was off duty took us to our seats, which was very nice of her though we did wonder where the on shift staff were.
We perused the menu and I pointed out that under Bottomless Beverages there were some neat things like Wildberry Iced Tea and Strawberry Lemonade. We both ordered the Lemonade which turned out to be quite good. It was lightly strawberry, not too acidic or sour from the lemons, a good balance overall.
For the meal itself, D ordered the Southern Smokehouse Burger with fries and gravy and I ordered the Bottomless Soup & Salad - my starting choices being the fully loaded baked potato soup and the fresco salad, with a side of garlic toast.
When the burger arrived, it looked really good. The fries were delicious (I stole a couple at the end) and the gravy looked really thick. The downside was the gravy wasn't actually gravy - it's peppercorn sauce. Unfortunately the server never said anything about that and if D had known he'd have ordered something else. I love peppercorn sauce but he doesn't care for it usually. The other thing was they need to learn to balance the brine of their inhouse pickling mixture. The pickles were pure garlic and D found them to be quite disgusting (we're huge pickle fans so that was quite disappointing).
My soup and salad arrived with a side of chips and salsa but no garlic bread. The server apologized and said it would be coming shortly. The salad was delicious enough I inhaled it - light spring greens, with a cheese that is a little like mozzarella and a nice light lime dressing. The soup was fantastic. It was thick, lots of potato and bacon chunks, fresh green onion, and lots of cheese.
When the waitress came back she asked how things were and I asked for a refill on the salad (since it was bottomless). Ten minutes later the salad arrived, by which time the soup was gone, and she took the empty salad bowl but did not do the important thing any good customer service person should think to do, which was ask some variation of the question "Would you like more of the potato soup?" I would have said yes. Unfortunately, she was around so infrequently I couldn't catch her attention to ask her to refill it (there's a reason I ordered bottomless). Also, by this point we were half an hour into our meal and the garlic toast still hadn't shown up.
She walked away for another twenty minutes. We finished our meal, she came by asking if we wanted the bill. Ten minutes later she came back, dropped the bill, and walked away again. After waiting another ten minutes we went up tot he front where the hostess helped us.
She asked how our meal was and we mentioned the food was good but refills were lacking and the garlic toast never showed up. She said that it was "good that the toast was never put on the bill" and all I said was that I would have sent it back if she had put it on there. The next thing she said, which we had to restrain from laughing at, was that it was super busy, unusually so, and that the server wasn't one to ask for help. To tell us that when she's the only one on duty that we should just put up with it was...shocking to say the least. A few alarm bells started to ring in my head at that:
1. That's not busy, it was practically dead in there, and if that is what they call busy they should have more people serving whether the server thinks they need help or not.
2. If a server looks like they need help someone should step in and assist, not expect the customers to 'deal with it.'
3. If a server needs help they should have no problem asking for it or they should be doing a different job. There is NOTHING wrong with asking for help and if you're bogged down it's a good thing, because otherwise people like me who have higher expectations and who will actually appreciate it if someone gets assistance won't come back. Ever. I may try chili's again but not that one.
Honestly, the food was great with a few tweaks, I would have liked to have tried my garlic bread and another bowl of soup since I did order the bottomless version of soup & salad (if I only wanted one I would have ordered that version). Unfortunately the service was so non-existent that I have no interest in going back to that location, and may or may not give the franchise itself another try based on the food possibilities at another location.
I may not decide that one for a while....
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