Constance W.
Yelp
Dinner on a Friday night in this restaurant was a head-banging nightmare. Right off the mark I must say the food was beautifully prepared & presented and also delicious. I had halibut w lemon & capers. Hubs had whiskey seared scallops. Both were delectable. He also had the seafood chowder that was very good. I had ordered a green salad as well, but it never showed up. The bread with the meal was served fresh & warm with an herbed butter which was soft enough to spread on the bread w/o tearing it to pieces (ok, it's the little things).
Our problem was the service. Our server was very friendly and quick to help us with our poor French by being an above average English speaker & being very gracious about it. Then the table next to us vacated & they seated a table of 10 next to ours. Four adults & SIX children under 7. That occurred as the Hubs was having his soup & I was waiting for my errant salad. It was also effectively the end of any attention from our server. While I certainly understand that the seating arrangement was not in the purview of the waitstaff, it only increased our displeasure. They were not even all seated before they had to rearrange the tables, one child was running from one end of the table to the other, colliding with chairs & tables all the way. Another was squalling about something. Two others were fighting over some imagined slight. Next minute three of them were under the table. Seriously? We paid a premium for this situation?
The server made repeated stops at this table and another 2-top next to ours to fill water glasses, bring extra plates, serve wine, deliver food & check on the clients while we languished in the corner hemmed in by the horde of feral children. Just the normal amount of attention from our server would have gone a long way toward giving us some reason to feel at least the tiniest bit positive about this completely horrific situation created by a foursome of rude, thoughtless, ego-centric, oblivious, asshole adults who paid zero attention to the effect the out of control actions of their offspring were having on other diners.
We had to remind the server of requests we had made more than once and at the end of our meal sat staring at empty plates so long it was ludicrous. When our server came to the table to ask if we wanted dessert, we had to remind her that the Hubs had ordered the Table d'Hote which included dessert her response was "Oh, yes. I'll get the menu." Then waited 10-15 minutes for the dessert menu to arrive, waited another 7 or 8 minutes for her to come back to take his order and yet another 10-15 for the dessert (which we ordered to-go in order to escape as quickly as we were able) to arrive. As I said earlier, each of these waiting periods was made interminable by the fact that the server was at the other tables seeing to niceties that should have waited a minute while she saw to our essentials. She frequently looked at us, saw we had put the menu down & were ready to order, but found it more pressing to fill glasses at the large table & clear plates from the other 2-top while we festered. Again, just the normal amount of attention would have spread oil on the choppy waters of our displeasure. A simple smile indicating she could see we were tired of the children bumping our chairs to get us to move out of their way and slapping their grubby little paws (which so recently had been on the floor under the table) on our table. Just a modicum of sympatico support rather than ho-hum disregard. Yes, I'm mad!