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| - Time for another brutally honest review. I must thank Summerlicious for allowing Yelpers to experience the best the city has to offer, and the crappiest.
Here's the thing about Summerlicious: Participating restaurants treat it one of two ways: they either (1) use it as an opportunity to let new customers sample the best their menu has to offer and thus prepare every dish as well as they would in the regular season, while keeping service impeccable or (2) they see it as a way to get more people to buy something for a change instead of having to look at an empty restaurant for another lunch or dinner service. Perhaps it keeps the place afloat for a little while longer and gives them a reason to partially clean their bathrooms.
Unfortunately, my experience at Brooklyn was more to the latter of the above scenarios. I think the best way to describe my experience would be to use the metaphor of being stranded on an island. I walked in and asked for my reservation only to be told that I needed to wait as they set up my table on the alley patio. I did so patiently, but when I was shown to my table by the bus boy it was just a black tablecloth. No cutlery, no glasses, no nothing. Just a black tablecloth of profound, infinite nothingness. Just like being stranded on an island, the following was so: I was thirsty so i waved my hand to receive water from someone, ANYONE, but to no avail. There I sat for 15 minutes until the waitress finally say my distress call and asked if I wanted some water to which I replied "YES! PLEASE!" She soon returned with a small cup of water before vanishing again without thinking to, oh I don't know, drop off the menu, some cutlery and perhaps a second glass for my dining companion who arrived a few minutes later.
When she passed again I called for the menu, ordered and waited. Soon the food arrived and she darted off but I felt compelled to ask her to put the brakes on because, guess what, THERE WAS STILL NO CUTLERY or glassware on the table! I was once a server and it's pretty basic procedure to do ONE THING if you forget to do other things: Look at the table. Looking at the table will give you all sorts of useful information about the customer's needs without them saying anything. If there is no cutlery, get some! If glasses of water or other beverage are empty, fill them! Don't have time to be on water duty? Get them a pitcher (we stole one from the table who left next to us).
On a basic service note, Harlem fails quite completely. Yes it was Summerlicious, but it wasn't that packed. And even so, the basics are the basics. Our server was nice enough but clearly not prepared to deal with a restaurant with actual customers in it.
The food, well... sucked. Sorry. The fried okra and pickles were literally just breaded and fried, served in a little plate with generic chipotle mayonnaise. Lame. The chicken and waffles sounded good on the menu, touting a scotch bonnet maple syrup! Of course we ordered that. We got lots of chicken with a tiny bit of some kind of fruit sauce, generic waffles (the same kind you make yourself at a 2.5 star Best Western continental breakfast) and maple syrup. No scotch bonnet spice in the syrup. Just plain old maple syrup. If they ran out of their special syrup (which I suspect is the case) then they should have notified us and not try to sneak Aunt Jemima onto our plates.
Dessert: Mango tart and friend plantain. The mango tart wasn't very tart but was fine and the plantains was just 5 pieces of rougly sliced up plantain on a plate. And when I say roughly sliced, I mean the pieces looked like someone had put on a blindfold, screamed "SWEEEEEEEEEEEDISH STYLE!!!" and just hacked at the banana like a viking and threw them on the plate. Not arranged in any artful way, not presented well. Literally just some banana on a plate.... ummmmmmm ok? Points for minimalism or just not giving a F***? That's cool. Guess they've been watching Swedish Meal Time.
Can't complain too much for 15 bucks but with gratuity added automatically the service should be at least to a reasonable standard.
....(Swedish Style).
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