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believe it or not i go to Applebees cos its in the area where i live, its near a Starbucks and a target and a Marshalls and it has it's own parking lot so i can dine, then get a coffee buzz and shop for household goods all in one shot.
there are tons of better eateries near there that are not chains but the parking situation around them is always tight and bad. so i end up going to Applebees because im too impatient to walk blocks to the good places. Applebees food isn't anything special but its protein recharges me. occasionally i will get a waiter or waitress who gets it about what i am looking for.
what's annoying is that all these A's waiters and waitresses dissapear into the back and never seem to come out. it takes them forever to come out and then they play games with the change, asking if you want your change(coins) back even if youve left a tip for them already and they see it on the table
its like all polite style and no substance with them. staff with ghetto mentalities dressed in business suits or plunging necklines
Loud drunk knuckleheads, loud and profane, at the table nearby. Complained to the waitress, she got the manager, they did nothing.
Why? The drunks were spending money like crazy. More than me and my little breakfast would earn them.
I've only walked out of a place twice. Both were for that reason (and I tolerate about anything). And neither place wanted to stop the money flowing from the knuckleheads.
I only walked out of a restaurant once. It was quite busy, but we were seated quickly. We got our drinks pretty fast, but the food took forever to get there. My friend got her sandwich fine, but my 'mexican-style' salad with grilled chicken (with tomatos, chilis, cheese, black beans, tortilla strips etc...) was nothing but some wilted lettuce with ONE crouton (not supposed to be in this salad) and a whole hard-boiled egg in the center.
When we finally got the waiter to come back and said that it was definitely not a chicken tortilla salad, the waiter argued with us loudly.
I've walked out when I have had to wait too long to be seated, when the restaurant was not clean, and when it was too hot.
We went to a restaurant on a hot evening in August. It was hotter inside the restaurant than outside. Everyone in the place was perspiring and fanning themselves. We got up and left. As we were walking out a waitress asked why we were leaving. When we told her that it was too hot, that's when it occurred to her that it would be a good idea to turn on the AC. Duh!
My boyfriend and I wanted to go out to lunch one afternoon and we decided to go to this Chinese restaurant that I heard was pretty good. We walked inside and it was very nice and the hostess was kind as well. Well she gave us our menus and when we looked at the prices, my eyes had to have grown as wide as the dinner plates and my boyfriend said, "Holy crap...." lol We felt bad about leaving because the people seemed so nice, but charging $25 for a plate of sesame chicken and rice is not what I call cheap, so we left and ended up going to a Chinese buffet down the road. We thought that maybe we'd come back for a special occasion like Valentines Day or something, but unfortunately they closed when the whole shopping center got remodeled.
Also, this may not count but when I was younger, we had ordered food at McDonald's and just before we got to the pick up window my mom and dad asked me did I want a Happy Meal or to sit down and eat instead and said "I want Piccadilly!!" so we left the line and went to Piccadilly in our mall. The mall closed over 10 years ago, but I still have memories of sitting at the round booth eating macaroni and cheese, broccoli, and fried chicken with my parents.
It's only happened a few times - its been a combination of:
1) Inattentiveness upon entry (oblivious or noticeably overworked staff) no greeting no seating in a reasonable amount of time
2) No subsequent follow up service upon seating - the 'sat you but forgot you' routine
3) Smells like something died inside the establishment - one time on a road trip I walked in about four steps caught a waft of something offensive and turned and left as if I forgot something in my vehicle
4) If its crowded I will ask up front how long to be seated but when I see multiple people who arrived after me be seated who did not have reservations I've left
5) The food I wanted is not available - only had this happen once but when you go to a place specifically known for some specialty food and then they don't have it I decided I'd come back when they did and find another option I enjoyed which was close by.
Smell will do it for me. If they wiped the table with a cloth that's dirtier than the table was (salad dressing!) or mopped the floor with water that was dirtier than the floor was, I'm out of there.
We went out for breakfast this morning. Our favorite place was too busy so we decided to try a new place. We walk in and stand next to the Please Wait to be Seated sign. We are ten feet from the counter where two people are cooking. No one says hello. A waitress looks at us, says nothing. We wait five minutes. No one greets us. The place is half empty and no one seems particularly busy.
We sit at one of the empty tables- maybe they forgot to move the sign after the rush? The waitress comes up and asks us if someone had sat us. We said no. She says that it'll be a few minutes and walks off.
We decided to cut our losses at that point and just leave. Would you have stayed?
I'd have done exactly as you did. Only I'm not so sure I would have even stayed long enough to sit down.
We walked out of a Denny's, never to return in Miami years ago when after we were seated ( we did get that far), the waitresses all refused to wait on us. It was obvious there was a serious management problem, although there seemed to be enough waitresses to go around, and they were waiting on other customers, service was exceedingly slow and it almost seemed the waitresses were slamming the food onto the customers' tables, were being snarky as they did it. I don't think they refilled drinks or water, either. I don't know who was assigned to the table we were sitting at, but the manager asked a couple of the waitresses to wait on us, but we actually saw them refuse, in let's say, rather crude terms, to even look our way. We sat there for a while, mainly to see how this would play out, it was so outrageous, and finally the manager came over to wait on us. At that point, we told him we had had had enough and didn't care to stay- there was no telling when, or in what condition ( one thinks of what waitstaff can do to food when they aren't happy) the food would be, and we left.
We reported this travesty to the corporate office, and were informed that they had lost several managers at that location ( gee, I wonder why?) and the manager there that night was a manager in one of the other Denny's and was just filling in.
Fortunately, while service hasn't always been stellar in some of the Denny's we've visited over the years when we traveled, we've never seen anything as bad as this place was.
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