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| - It was Game Day ASU vs Washington so the entire area was busy.
So many new options have opened in this area, however I kept my vow to just follow along. Although rare, I wasn't the leader on this day. I was a little heart sunk when our group walked right past Postinos, and a touch relieved as we strolled by Dickies BBQ, and then there it was... The Mad Hatter, I had been there before and it was always empty. Today the place was very busy with a patio extension and extra security. As we made our way through the place we ended up at a great table on the original patio, smack dab on the corner of College and Veterans Way. The table was perfect, and the company was stellar and that's as good as it got.
Our server was obviously not a regular staff member, he seemed like someone's buddy that just worked on game days. Initial beer orders taken and tiny paper game day menus dropped. The menu was small, with just a few items, a burger, chicken strips, French dip and chili cheese fries. I guess when your expected volume soars from regular days you have to do what it takes to keep the quality coming out of the kitchen. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. everything from the kitchen was barley passable to awful.
French dips were bland with no flavor at all and the au jus was served in 1 ounce Jello shot cups, certainly not dippable, and the fries with mine were Ice cold. The Chili Cheese Fries were even worse because they looked disgusting and tasted like curry and were smothered in gloppy flavorless cheese. My friend said she was going to eat her burger but it wasn't very good, and the chicken strips weren't finished by a big 17 year old boy.
All this served with no salt and pepper, no napkins or utensils and OLD broken, almost empty ketchup bottles.
I know this place is almost always slow, It really needs customers and I think instead of turning off 300 people on game days they should try and wow 300 people on game days. Location for us was great and it was a nice gathering of old friends, at least we had that.
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