Just Can't Get It Right

I have not had many blogs about restaurants lately. The reasons is, I don't like to have negative posts. I will call it what it is, but I like to write about great experiences, not bad. I do have another criteria. I will not write anything negative about a restaurant that we know the owner, or write negatively about a restaurant where someone takes us out to dinner.

So, all that to say, other than our super regular restaurants, there has not been much great to write about lately.

Friday night, we decided to go to a favorite spot in Dallas. Every time we have been there, the food is excellent. We had a great table on the patio by the main street. Lots of fun to watch the people go buy. The waiter was average, but the food . . . . terrible. If that had been my first time, I would never go back. I decided to order the special instead of sticking to my regular favorite. Pops had my favorite. The special was fried chicken with potato salad. (If I was on death row, that would be my last meal.)

Pops stroganoff tasted like it was burned and had been salvaged with some vinegar. On the friend chicken front, if you can't compare to Babe's, don't even try. The potato salad had truffle oil on it. There are very few things I don't like, but I have learned lately, to stay away from truffle oil. The first bite is good, but after the third, it is sickenly rich. The chicken was marginal at best.

We didn't even try dessert. We decided to cut our losses with the meal.

So last night, we were hoping for a better experience. We went to La Joya in Las Colinas. We usually go there about once a month. We know a couple of servers and recognize the staff. Not last night. It looked like a whole different crew. There were more staff than customers and the staff spent the majority of their evening drinking at the bar.

To start off with, the bartender came to our table to take our drink order. I said water. He said margarita, beer or wine? I said Dr. Pepper. He looked at Pops and said, margarita, beer or wine? Pops said Dr. Pepper. He then chastised us for not getting a margarita. He said, what is wrong with you?

After a long wait, we ordered an appetizer and our meal. They all came out at the same time. The waitress never came back. Finally after about 30 minutes she took Pops plate and I asked for a to-go container. She didn't come back for another 15 minutes. We ordered our favorite dessert. It came out with no ice cream or almonds (our favorite part). We had to flag her down and wait another 30 minutes for our check. In the mean time, she and the bartender were yelling at each other in Spanish all night in between customers (all 4 tables of them).

The check was then another joke. The computer was down and she had to come back and ask us what we had. She hand wrote a ticket and did not add correctly. She was huffing and puffing and yelling in Spanish the entire time.

So, if we could have gotten Friday's atmosphere and service mixed with Saturday's food, it would have been perfect.