Bad Dinner Wait

Last week one of my cousin's messaged my sisters, myself and our mother's asking if we wanted to have a girl's night out, dinner, this coming Wednesday since we had a lot of fun the last time. So last night my mom, both my sister’s and their little girls (2 weeks and 2 years), my cousin and her mom (my aunt) head to Bricktown Brewery. They have several locations but the one in our town is still fairly new, opened just a few months back, and while I hadn’t eaten there yet I’d been wanting to. Also, Tuesday was my cousin’s birthday so we were celebrating her.

Starting out we thought that going out on a Wednesday would mean the place wouldn’t be all that busy. Well, we were wrong, at least for this place. When we got there we told them we had 6 people plus a toddler and baby so we'd need a high chair and sling. They said no problem and went to push a couple of tables together. One of the girls comes back a few minutes later and tells us that the tables they were going to use for us ended up having people seated at them. Huh? And that there was a large group that came in just before us that had been there a while so they need to seat them at the tables they were going to put us at. Um ok? Our wait would now be 15-20 minutes and they would be starting a wait list. It seems that they were just randomly seating people without logging people into the electronic seating system so they had no clue who was seated where and had to sort it out before they could seat anyone else.

Now normally when a restaurant has a wait list, they ask for your name, give you a buzzer, or something. They did none of that, but I figured they knew we were here and they’d be putting us at the top of the list since we were first in line when they started it. So we sit to wait and are chatting. We see all sorts of groups with 3-4 people come in and be seated within 5 minutes or so of walking in the door, but the restaurant does have seating that wouldn’t work for us, booths and such that were not large enough, so I didn’t think much of it. After 20 minutes, one of the hostesses comes over and confirms the number in our group and asks my cousin for a phone number. Apparently that’s how they do wait lists, they send you a text when your table is ready. We are not happy that they are just now doing this because it means that they have not been paying attention to the seating to make sure they can seat us, but hope we won’t have to wait much longer.

We wait another 15 minutes; the text says that our table should be ready so my cousin goes to ask them what’s going on. They don’t know. Those are their words. Not even the manager knows what is going on as he is standing there just staring at the seating chart. It seems that in the past 35 minutes they still hadn’t figured out how to use it and had just kept seating people without paying any attention to the fact that they had a large group that could only use certain tables. They couldn’t even tell us how much longer we’d have to wait.
After talking it over we made the decision to go somewhere else if we could find a place that could seat us right away. My cousin happened to have the number for Granite City in her phone and gave them a call. She comes back inside and tells us that they have a table ready for us right now. So we all stand to leave. As we head out the door I look straight at one of the hostesses and say “Bye” and the other one actually says “Hope you have a good night” which ticked me off as they seemed to be doing their best to ruin it. I just turned and glared at her. That is when she tried to mutter “sorry about that” or something in regards to the mess up. I just said “No” and walked out the door.

That was the only apology we got from any of them for the entire incident. No offer of a free drink or appetizer, not even a sorry we messed up. Nothing to show that they actually cared.

My younger sister and I were also not happy about the fact that we missed out getting a free beer. The restaurant has a phone app that after you download it you can redeem a coupon for a free beer on your first visit. This excited us because we both wanted to try one of their craft beers but our budgets are tight. Well we didn't redeem them right away figuring we'd wait until we were seated. I'm not sure what changed, but after the first 20 minute wait we figured we'd have a table any minute and went ahead and redeemed them.

When we all were seated at the new restaurant my sister informed me that as they were leaving my 2 year old niece, Rylee, told them that we were leaving because they wouldn’t find us a table. She is a very articulate 2 year old and I hope those girls felt some shame being admonished by her.

The rest of the evening was very nice. Granite City didn’t have a whole lot of business that night so the place was fairly quiet. We wouldn’t have been there nearly as long if we had stopped talking long enough to look at the menu quicker, but it was ok. The only thing that went wrong there was Rylee got her finger stuck in the buckle of the high chair. It pinched her finger badly so it hurt her a lot but it wasn’t serious. The waitress filled a latex glove with ice for her to put on it and that made her happy. In fact that glove was her favorite thing of the night and she asked to take it home. Of course it was just filled with water by the time we left, but she didn’t care. My sister had also told the waitress that it was our cousin’s birthday so at the end of the meal she brings out a long metal, chilled plate that had Happy Birthday written on it in caramel along with a cookie covered in ice cream. My aunt got some cheesy pictures of her trying to hold it up so it could be read while also not dropping the cookie on the floor. She also got a nice picture of her licking the caramel off the plate.

Even though the night started out rough it had a happy ending. We still had great food with even better company and had a wonderful night. I just don’t know if I’ll ever try going back to the first restaurant again.