Peter T.
Yelp
The food was great, but the service was a disaster.
We arrived right on time for a 7:45 PM reservation Friday night. We were a group of four, two couples.
We were sat down, had a round of one cocktail each, ordered some appetizers to share and some mains and one bottle of wine. Everything was going great, the food was really interesting and inventive. The service seemed a little slow, but we didn't mind we were having a nice time.
We had just finished our main courses and we were thinking about ordering some dessert when the problem happened.
The staff came and told us that we had to leave. We were like what, what happened? They said it was a two hour time limit on the table and it was 945. We couldn't believe it! I mean, we had been eating promptly just doing a normal nice evening out we were not misbehaving or anything like that. The slowness was really just from their side. We had actually been planning to order some dessert, but we couldn't do that because they told us we had to get off the table.
We were halfway through our glasses of wine. They said we could finish our drinks at the bar, but we had to leave the table now.
The fact that they treated us like this at the end of a meal really put a taint on the entire evening.
It's supposedly a nice French restaurant on a Friday evening, we should be able to just relax and enjoy it without feeling some sort of time pressure to get out within a specific 2 hour limit.
It's symptomatic something at the heart of the problem with some restaurants that they are over commercialized and they sacrifice the experience for the sake of getting people in and out quickly like we are just cattle.
I mean, if you really want to encourage people to free up the table, there are nicer ways to do it.
First of all you could give a warning about the two hour limit at the beginning. I've been to places where they tell you the table must be free by a certain time and I've always been Totally fine if they tell me that and then we could plan for it, but they gave us absolutely no warning about it this time.
Secondly, if you do need to move people, they could've done that in a nice way too. They could've helped to arrange a nice spot off to the side somewhere for us and settle us in. they did nothing like that. They just said you're on your own. see if you can find something at the bar, but you have to get off the table now.
I feel really bad for the kitchen staff because they did a great job making some really interesting, creative and delicious food. But the overall experience was undermined by the way we were treated at the end.
We all would never go back there.