I went to an Appreciation Dinner last night. It was held at a Radisson Hotel.

The service was soooo bad.

My water glass had a lipstick mark on it.

Iced Tea was served. Since I don't like tea, I asked if I could get coke instead and they brought me some coke. When another person at my table saw my coke he also asked for coke and was told he would be charged separately since coke wasn't on the menu.

We asked for more rolls but the waiter told us they were out of rolls. We asked another waiter for more rolls and he went to get some but never returned. Finally, one of my friends asked one of the waiters in Spanish and was promptly brought a tray of rolls.

But the kicker came when my friend held up her cloth napkin full of holes in it. All of us just roared at that. I even snapped a picture of her "holey" napkin.

As we were leaving, one of the men at our table remarked that we were the only table that had everyone laughing throughout the evening.

We have had bad service before and we have had horrible experiences at restaurants. At that point, you have to laugh...or cry.

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I guess my worries extend beyond what you *see* and it makes you wonder what is happening in the kitchen behind closed doors. Yikes.

If I think about it too much, I'll never eat out again.

My sweetie and I were in Pagosa Springs, CO and had asked some locals for a place to get a nice sandwich or burger and a beer. They pointed us in the direction of a local hangout. After we were seated at a table the waitress walks up, slaps two menus down on the table and says "Cook's having a bad day, could be a while".
My SO and I looked at each other and just started to laugh. I said " I don't want to eat where cook's having a bad day". And left.
The really crazy part was that no one else in the place seemed to think there was anything wrong with what she had said.

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DH wanted to surprise me a few years ago for our anniversary and took me someplace that neither of us had ever been, Kool Beanz Cafe. We heard lots of good things about it from several people. It's not a real fancy restaurant, but it's very eclectic and the menu changes from week to week. There was a wait to get a regular table, so we decided to sit at the counter where you can watch them cook the food. They had an extensive beer and wine menu. We're not wine people, so DH ordered a beer. They were out of the kind DH first ordered, so he asked about another kind and they were out of that too. This went on for a while and by DH's 5th choice, which they were out of too, DH just decided to have water. We went ahead and ordered our food and they brought us some bread. While we were sitting there eating bread, here comes a roach walking across the counter right in front of us, and not more than a few seconds later, here comes another roach. DH and I scooted back, and at this point, we decided we would not be eating anything there, but we wanted to tell someone what we saw. One of the cooks turned around and saw the roaches on the counter and when we looked up, we saw that we saw that he was watching us, almost out of the corner of his eye, for our reaction. When we looked up at him, we were getting ready to say something and he turned back around really quickly to pretend that he didn't see anything. These roaches were just a couple feet away from the food in a very well lit and busy restaurant! I can't imagine what happens when the lights are turned off! There's no way that they don't know they have a problem.

Anyway, our waiter hadn't been back to check on us for quite a while, so we got up to go find him. We told him that they had a problem with roaches and we had just seen two of them walking across the counter in front of us and we were leaving. He just said "Oh, okay. I'll cancel your order." like it was no big deal. I wish we would have made more of a scene, but I really didn't want the whole restaurant staring at us.

Since it was so late, we ended up eating our anniversary dinner at Miami Subs - a local fast food restaurant. We laugh about it now all the time. Once in a while, if we're feeling really childish when we drive by that restaurant, we'll roll down the windows and yell "They've got roaches in there!" LOL The restaurant is always packed and there are usually people waiting outside for a table.

Some friends took us to a restaurant with a buffet once. The place had rave reviews. Well, while I was at the buffet, I saw a cockroach scurry across the serving area. I told the hostess who was standing nearby and she said, "Ugh. Not again!" and then she swatted it with a magazine. She failed to kill it, it just ran away.

So, I could barely put the food in my mouth when one of my friends got up to use the lady's room She came scampering back and told us that there was a mouse in there with her.

The place was shut down by the health department not long after that. It reopened, but needless to say, we've never been back.

I just thought of another time something happened to us at a restaurant. About 5 or 6 years ago, DH and I decided to go eat at a new sports bar/restaurant in town. DH ordered a burger or something and I ordered a chicken cheesesteak sandwich and we also ordered some chicken fingers as an appetizer. When we got our chicken fingers, we started eating them and thought the texture seemed really strange. We each looked at the rest of the chicken fingers we had bitten into and saw that the chicken was still completely raw on the inside! We told our waiter and he said "Oh, sorry about that. That happened last week too." He asked if we wanted another order of chicken fingers. We told him that we didn't and we would just wait on our sandwiches. When our sandwiches came out, DH's burger was fine, but my chicken cheesesteak was actually a philly cheesesteak. We flagged the waiter back down and I told him that I ordered a chicken cheesesteak, not a philly cheesesteak. He actually argued with me, but he begrudgingly said that he would take it back and "change" my order. Ummm, I didn't want my order "changed," I just wanted what I had originally ordered. I was positive I ordered the chicken, and I even asked DH if he remembered hearing me say chicken and he said that he did. Anyways, when my sandwich was finally brought out, I took one bite and refused to eat any more of it. It was disgusting and it tasted like they dropped the chicken on the floor before they put it on the bread - and they probably did. I'm absolutely convinced they did something to that sandwich. We really should have asked for the manager, but we just left some money on the table and then we left.