Well, my friends you and I are on completely different pages. I've worked in the restaurant business before, and I know the difference between a mediocre dining experience and a phenomenal experience. Before you try to jump down my throat and complain that "not everyone can afford to eat at (insert fancy-pants restaurant name here)", I'm not saying you have to go to a fancy-pants restaurant to have a phenomenal experience.
We're gonna start with the wait. A Friday around 12:30pm, my wait time was only about 30 minutes. I found that reasonable, if not fairly quick considering the number of people in the restaurant. That's going to be pretty much where my experience stopped being good. My server was a poor excuse for a server, and had either never been a server before or didn't know what his job entailed.
My drink/appetizer order was taken within 4 minutes of being seated. The first drink (which was fairly easy order of a peach tea) order showed up right as the appetizer got to the table. My massively complicated drink (a coke) still had not arrived. A couple of minutes later my server walked back up to take my order (still without my coke). About 10 minutes later, my appetizer was gone, and my server came back... to take my order... (No I didn't make a mistake, you really did read that right. My server came back to take my order again). After it was pointed out that my order had already been taken, my server seemed genuinely surprised (even though he is the one that took the order), and asked if anything was needed. Since I'm pretty thirsty because I had already been seated and eaten my appetizer (about 25 minutes after originally being seated) it was finally pointed out that my super-mega-colossally complicated drink order of a glass of Coca-Cola had not been brought. I didn't get an apology, and had to wait almost another 5 minutes for my coke.
My entrees finally arrived. The food was good. The order was partially wrong, but was still good. My server asked if everything was good, and when it was pointed out that some of it was wrong, I was visited by two different managers. They both brought what was needed to fix my order. Since my coke had been long empty, one of the managers brought me a refill.
I got the check, gave the card, card was run, and brought back to the table. My sever didn't hand over a pen with which to sign the receipt. No, instead he stood there while we had to search for a pen. After coming up without an ink pen for about a full 60 seconds, I was assaulted by a seriously dumb question. "Did you need a pen?" No thanks, I'll just see if I can sign it using telekinesis. Borrowed the ink pen, and he stood there, 6 inches from my table while a signature and tip were added to the receipt.
The nearest sever that wasn't mine, didn't seem to be any better. He was telling the table behind me that they were gonna be firing a whole bunch of servers soon, and all he did was complain about the kitchen being slow, and everyone but him messing up orders and making his job harder. He also was scratching his nose at the table, and counted his tips in front of another table.
Bottom line, the food was actually pretty good, but service was disgusting. Until this restaurant, Buffalo Wild Wings had my title for worst service. Looks like Cheddar's took that title from BWW at gunpoint. I had high hopes that Lafayette would have a good restaurant (something not as bad as Chili's, Applebee's, or O'Charley's).
Looks like my search continues...
