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| - In what should probably have come as no surprise, but somehow still managed to astonish me, this location suffers from some of the same management drawbacks as the other Elephant Bar location in Peoria. Somewhat ironically, it also suffers from the inability to properly prepare the same dish on a consistent basis.
Allow me to elaborate with an example from my most recent visit. My wife and I dined here for lunch as we work nearby and had been several times before. As per usual, service was simply so-so. A common theme between this restaurant and their Peoria location is slow drink service, and I cannot understand how that can be when the place is 70% empty at the start of lunch service (11am).
I ordered my standby, go-to dish which is the rock sugar beef. When cooked properly, it is one of my all-time favorites and, for the last year or so, the only thing I will order at this place because I can't bring myself to pass on it for something else. After what seemed like a bit too long of a wait, the food finally came out and, much to my disappointment, the rock sugar beef was once more prepared incorrectly by incompetent and lazy kitchen staff.
So what was it this time, at this location? For starters, the wrong kind of mushrooms were used, and mixed in with the standard fair. I'm all for variety, but I prefer the mushrooms they're -supposed- to cook it with per the menu, not whatever other types they have kicking about in the kitchen. That's beside the main issue, however, which was the quality of the meat. Out of the maybe 7 hunks of beef that I have, at least half of them were overly fatty and/or contained gross sections of grizzle. And it wasn't the kind you could cut off, it was all through and horribly marbled into the meat, so there was no way to salvage the pieces. The kicker, however, was that the largest piece on the plate, by about three times the size of the nearest competitor, was almost 90% fat chunk. There was almost no usable meat on it, it was literally a pile of fat and sinew that someone should have thrown away from the get-go, but instead decide to cook up and serve to me, as if I was a dog that would eat this kind of utter crap.
I told the server, who seemed to have no empathy whatsoever, that this was not what I expect from one of the more expensive items on the menu and a signature dish. He offered to get the manager and send him over, and sure enough the guy showed up in short order. This is where the story takes an even worse turn.
From the start, this guy was a completely dismissive jerk. I told him I'd been eating this dish many times at both locations, probably fifty times in total, and never had it this nasty before. I knew what it was supposed to be and this was absolutely not it. His response? Basically a superficial, insincere and backhanded apology, stating that, "Well, you've had it 50 times without a problem and things happen."
Excuse me? You're basically telling a customer who just told you he's been in your restaurants that many times that, "Oh well, it happens. Sorry you expect perfection, that's not gonna happen." He also went on a tirade about how he serves hundreds of these a day without a problem so clearly this is just an anomaly and nothing to worry about. Great customer service, tell me I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, I really want to hear that after you served me dog food.
To put it mildly, I was shocked by his attitude and body language. He offered to have another batch cooked up, but I declined (who would want the same idiot to cook them more dog food?). He made no mention of going back to the kitchen staff to ask what brain donor decided to put a 1lb lump of fat on my plate and call it beef. He didn't take the offending, dog-food looking pile (I lumped all the inedible pieces together to show him how much it was) back to the kitchen staff either. He just walked off in a huff, pissed that I was unwilling to accept garbage after 50 visits. I guess his expectation is that I should allow for complete crap food every now and then, otherwise I'm some kind of effete snob.
And yes, he comped it off the bill, but I'd have preferred if he had gone back and gotten an explanation for why I was served utter dog food, how it made it out of the kitchen to begin with, and come back to tell me why it wasn't going to happen again and why I should continue visiting so frequently. Instead, I just get it coldly comped off the bill (he didn't even say he would do this) and then no drink refills for the remainder of our time in the restaurant. I guess that was my punishment for complaining about being served something unfit for animals, much less human consumption.
I will never return to this location until I receive an apology from someone in upper management. I cannot believe that I have to go through this sort of disappointment again after the experience at the Peoria location, but apparently this is some kind of endemic problem to this chain.
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