i thought the economy was bad ... you really want to kick us out?

I know it's been a while since I've posted here ... I apologize for that. It has been a crazy summer already, and we've only begun. Anyway .. I wanted to share a bit about our recent short vacation to Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Overall it was a great trip and I thoroughly enjoyed the rest and beach-time. We even got to see two sharks swimming just a few feet away from us. Of course we high-tailed it out of the water after we realized that it really was sharks. Anyway ... we ate out a few times, and I was so infuriated by what happened while eating out.

Our first day in Fl, we were picked up by our friends Andy and Heather at the airport and drove down to Miami to see South Beach and eat lunch. We went to a great little restaurant on Miami Beach called Chihuahua Cafe that served amazing authentic mexican food and had really good service. We had a gift certificate for all these restaurants from Restaurant.com so we could save quite a bit of money while eating out. Anyway. We had planned to go to a small Italian restaurant called Bocca Restaurante Italiano located in North Miami. North Miami by the way is not necessarily the nicest or best part of Miami, but this area looked ok, and inside the restaurant was clean and nice. The website did not say we needed a reservation, and since it was a wednesday evening at 7pm, we figured it wouldn't be too busy.

We arrived at the restaurant and no one greeted us, so we just sat down at a table. This was a small restaurant, with only about six or eight tables in the whole restaurant. Three of the tables were full of customers. We sat there for 5 or 8 minutes before the waitress came to greet us. She didn't even have a smile on her face, neither did she say hello. She just blurted out "You don't have a reservation, so you're gonna have to wait, OKAY!? Okay." and walked away. She didn't offer us menus or water or anything. Like I said, it was a small restaurant, and she was none too discreet about her words, so every head in the room turned to look at us. We sat there for another five minutes or so, before the boys decided to run across the street to the store and we would call them when we could order. After a while, we heard yelling in the kitchen, something about how it wasn't her fault that she'd ruined the man's chicken, and who cared if the whole table had eaten without him and he had to eat alone, LIFE GOES ON. This poor man she was talking about was sitting RIGHT outside the kitchen door, and heard everything. Then she huffed out to our table and told Heather and I that they were way too busy for us, and we could maybe come back after 8:30 that night, but we had to leave THEN, because they had people who had made reservations coming in and they were more important. Once again, every head in the room turned to look at us as Heather and I scooped up our bags and walked out of the restaurant. I was shocked ... I'd never been thrown out of a restaurant before...It seems like if the economy is really so bad, you would be grateful for any business that comes. We would've tipped afterall.

Needless to say, we didn't feel like waiting 1.5 hours to go back to her sour attitude, so we went across the street to Panera bread. That's usually a fool-proof option, right? Not. This place was so filthy, I couldn't find a table to sit down at that didn't have grime and crumbs all over the place. We ordered what we usually get, soup and salad and a sweet tea. I don't know about you when you order sweet tea, but for me, when I order sweet tea, I usually mean the brewed tea with a lemon in it, not the nasty Nestea raspberry tea from the soda machine. So they charged me for the tea, and then I get over to the drink table and there is no sweet tea. Only unsweetened, and it's horrible. It tastes like Licorice, and I had to throw out it. The manager huffed to me that they didn't serve sweet tea, and it was in the soda machine if I wanted some. I said that's fine, I'll just get some Dr. Pepper. Strike One.

Our food finally came. I had ordered Broccoli Cheddar Soup with a new salad they had. My plate came with a bowl of wilted lettuce and a few strawberries thrown on top and a sandwich. I politely told the girl at the counter that I had ordered soup and not a sandwich and she looked at me like I was insane. She grabbed my sandwich off the plate, rolled her eyes, and grabbed the tiniest paper cup she could find and put LITERALLY three or four spoonfuls of soup in the cup and threw it on my plate. Heather and Andy got sandwiches and Heather opened hers up before biting in -- the lettuce was rotten. Andy had already eaten a few bites of his, and paid for it the next day with a stomach bug.

We all took our plates back to the front and asked for our money back, explaining all the problems we had. Thankfully, the manager was polite and willing to give us back our money, though he mentioned that they'd just re-opened (this was at 7pm) and they'd been shut down (maybe the health department????). Nathan noticed that while we were getting out money back, the girl who had given us our food was yelling in the back about us, looking straight at him and talking about how annoying we were. Geez, I didn't realize it was annoying to expect un-rotten food and the right order when I PAID for the food.

I was just amazed how horrid the service was. We had a good ending to our evening though...We drove back to Pompano beach, and found a nice little restaurant called Frank's Restaurante that served amazing food and had excellent service. We were the only ones in the restaurant, so the waiters were so friendly. There was even signed pictures in the back of Frank Sinatra and other celebrities who had been at the restaurant. So if you're even in the Lauderdale/Pompano beach area, take the exit for Atlantic Ave, go all the way down to the beach, and Frank's is on your right hand side in the last block before the beach.