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| - I go to Montreal every year for vacation and I tend to love everything about it. The food is wonderful, the people are friendly, the atmosphere is beautiful. Then I went to Le Saloon.
If you're an Anglophone, avoid this place. A group of friends and I were recommended this place by a Francophone as a great place for brunch and cocktails. When we got there, we were seated in an inconvenient and out of the way second floor with no air conditioning on a very hot day. Even though we were sweating like oxen, we decided to try and make the best of it. However, their brunch menu was French only, and when we asked if there was an English-language menu, our waiter said no. Nonplussed, we did all of the work ourselves, translating every single item we wanted, since he did not try to help us once he knew we spoke no French. We ordered everything in French as best we could, along with drinks.
The food and drinks were good, don't get me wrong. Everything else was awful. The waiter, who appeared to be afflicted with an attitude problem wherein he spoke perfectly serviceable English but chose to act like a buffoon out of a commitment to outright snobbery, took half an hour to even come back with our drinks and take our orders. The restaurant was nowhere near busy enough to warrant this, mind you. 45 minutes later, we got our order, which was chock full of meat that we had specifically, in French, requested be left off of it for our vegetarian friends in the party, rendering the food uneatable. Finally, after ordering a second round of drinks to stave off the heat, half an hour of being ignored convinced us to cancel the outstanding order and have our checks brought to the table.
Let me make one thing clear. I tip. I tip 20% across the board, unless the service is bad enough to dip below that or stellar enough to warrant more. The service was so half-assed and passive-aggressive that I broke this rule and didn't tip a cent. If I could subtract my tip from the total I would have felt somewhat assuaged.
In closing, I hope I don't have to point out the hilarity of a cowboy-themed bar being insulted that awful Americans would grace their establishment. Nice to see our culture is good enough for you to structure your business around but our money isn't good enough for you to put any effort towards earning.
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