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| - There are no shortage of places to drink in the East End, so I'm not clear on why I would ever return to a place where the bartender treated me like garbage for no apparent reason.
My experience here was a short but admittedly eventful one. I and a group of co-workers stopped in after hosting a visiting speaker for dinner at Bangkok Balcony right next door. The downstairs was not super crowded, but there was no table large enough for everyone in our group. The friendly waitress agreed to open the upstairs for us. After she brought our round of beers, myself and a colleague realized she hadn't brought us pint glasses for our porters (generally not a beer you want to drink out of a cold bottle). Rather than waiting for the waitress to come back up, then making her go down and back up the stairs another time, I went downstairs to ask for some glasses at the bar.
First I was just ignored. For maybe 5 minutes I watched the bartender shoot the shit with some people at the other end of the bar. He was not making drinks or taking orders, just conversing. Which is fine, except that he looked at me several times and it was obvious I wanted something. Eventually, someone came out of the kitchen, so I asked this person if he could grab me a couple of pint glasses. He told me he couldn't, because he's not the bartender, but did go to the other end of the bar to let the bartender know what I wanted. Several minutes later, the bartender deigned to grace me with his presence. He began to hand me two pint glasses, then said he needed to see my ID before he could give them to me. I told him I already had drinks, I just wanted the glasses, and that I'd come downstairs so that the waitress didn't have to make an extra trip. He said "No ID? No glasses." Ok, fine. I'm 35 years old. I have an ID. I don't look remotely underage, but I can play the bartender-on-a-power-trip game as well as anyone. So I went upstairs, grabbed my ID, came back down and, after waiting probably another five minutes for him to grace me with his presence again, showed it to him. Only now he needed *2* IDs, what with there being 2 glasses. So up the stairs I traipse, back down, and now - I shit you not - now he says "How many people are up there? I need to see everyone's IDs." I looked at him in astonishment and said "I only came down here to save your waitress the trip. I've now gone up and down the stairs three times. Everyone up there already has a drink." His reply - seriously - was "I just can't go serving drinks to complete strangers." I'm sorry, what?? You're a bartender. It's your JOB to serve drinks to complete strangers.
At this point, I'd had enough. I told him I didn't mind showing an ID, and that I understand people have to do their jobs, but that there was absolutely no reason for him to be a dick about it. I used those words. At which point he said, "Well then you are welcome to leave." So we did. Our entire group left, and I refused to pay for beers that we didn't get to drink. The waitress went and talked to the bartender - seeing how upset I was and also seeing that I was not going to give her money for drinks we couldn't actually imbibe. She came back and told us it was all a misunderstanding and that it was fine if we stayed, that he didn't know that we were her customers, yada yada. No. I'm not spending my money in a place that treats people like shit. While waiting for the bus afterwards, one of my colleagues said that he and another friend had encountered similar hostility from this same bartender before, and had also been "asked to leave." (I didn't get the bartender's name, but I'm guessing he's the only one working there who looks like he just stepped off the set of Duck Dynasty).
I guess the Squirrel Hill Café does such great business that they don't need any more? This was my first and last visit to this place. We were very sorry that the waitress had to pay for the bartender's shit attitude, but hopefully it will spur her to say something to him or to management about the fact that he is running off customers. What an absolute disgrace.
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