Emily S.
Yelp
All the charm and class of a TGI Friday's with none of the professionalism.
I live in D.C., and a friend who lives in Boston and I ended up at this place because we're staying at a nearby hotel for a wedding. A bunch of people from the wedding decided to go here for easy drinks and bites the night before the big day - like 20 of us. Admittedly, the restaurant had no notice that we were coming so it would have been unreasonable to expect them to just magically have a massive table or private room available, but they seemed to have no desire whatsoever to accommodate us in the slightest, despite the fact that hey, we just brought them a ton of business and were looking to spend serious money on drinks. No attempt to make space for us somewhere, not so much as someone going to take a look at the bar to see if they could pull some high tops together for us, nothing. They acted like we were an inconvenience.
Fine. So, since they didn't have any free tables near each other in the main dining area, we decided to go to the bar, which was seat yourself. So a group of five of us crowded around a high top that was meant for 3 or 4, settled in and started to think about ordering, only for the host to come over with another party in tow and say as curtly as possible, "Actually, this is part of our seating." As in, this isn't seat yourself, it's only seat yourself at the bar. Nice. Thanks for making that clear before we put our bags down and got settled, bro. After he booted us off our table without so much as a "sorry about that," we wandered over to the bar and started taking stools as they became available. Some of the patrons were very sweet, offering to move over so we could sit next to each other.
A few people from our group put names on the list for the dining room but we were hungry so my Boston friend and I decided to order some drinks and an app to tide ourselves over before being seated. She ordered a cocktail off the menu from the very unenthused-seeming bartendress. This cocktail, which was large and apparently tasty and strong and only $7 (!!! It would be at least $12 if not $14 in D.C. or Boston and half the size) is the only reason I have for even giving this joint a second star.
I don't eat meat except for fish, and I found the vegetarian options on their menu less than appealing, with no veggie burger, no vegetarian pastas that seemed like they would be remotely satisfying without a meat addition, and my only other options were things like the ever ubiquitous token hummus and some kind of vegetable sandwich that is basically the (barely even) suburban answer to the vegetable-forward small plate cornucopia that is urban dining, replete with fourteen different kinds of roasted cauliflower, braised brussels sprouts and every known variation on kale ever to have been developed in the history of humanity. I was displeased. Meanwhile, the fish dishes had prices indicative of having been pre-frozen.
Ultimately I asked for, and I state this verbatim, "A regular hot coffee and some onion rings." The bartendress didn't understand me. So I repeated, "A coffee and some onion rings." She brings my coffee after a few minutes, sets it down too hard, spills tons of it into the saucer, says nothing. Nice. I try it after dumping in the requisite amount of sugar and cream (out of one of those IHOP style peel-lid containers, not an actual cream dish). It was weak and stale.
Meanwhile, we close our tab while still waiting for the onion rings, figuring it would keep things simple for when we switched to a table later. The bill comes and I see that it says "loaded onion rings" for $8.99. My friend mentions that the menu said loaded onion rings come with bacon. So I say to the bartendress that I don't eat meat and I didn't realize they were loaded. She goes, "I can change it but it's still the same price." OK, we say.
The loaded onion rings, I saw after looking at the menu, come with bacon, some kind of "Cholula ranch" whatever that is, and a few different kinds of cheese. When she arrives with my "same price" onion rings, it's a plate of like six super fried standard rings with nothing on them. I said I don't eat meat. Not that I don't eat cheese or ranch.
At this point I was completely fed up with this little experiment in mediocrity. Meanwhile, the tables that my party had asked for became available but were on the opposite side of the restaurant from where many of our compatriots were having drinks at the bar and, since several of the self-seating bar stools had opened up in the meantime, they decided to just stay put and eat there. Not wanting to subject myself to the whims of this service staff or this shining example of the standard, GOP-voting Merikan fare that is no doubt the source of this nation's longstanding romance with heart disease any longer, my friend and I left for the one restaurant in the area to have obtained more than a 3.5 star rating on Yelp.