Spectacular Service

OK, so I don’t expect much from some restaurants. I certainly didn’t expect anything spectacular from the Molson Brewhouse in the Calgary airport. Turned out it was pretty spectacular though.

We had to wait in line to get a table. This was odd since the restaurant wasn’t that busy, and there were a few empty tables. Weird for sure. Then the hostess, you know the person that is supposed to greet guests, talk to them, be the face for the establishment, motioned for us to follow her, without saying a word. Odd. As she sat us down she mentioned they were a little short on menus, then walked away. We had no menu at all. Not even one for the table.

The waitress came and took our drink order, and again we sat with no menu. I spied one across the way on a table next to a woman who was waiting for her bill. Sue went over and asked her if we could use it. Problem solved.

Our drinks came and they were fine. Sue and I had beer, the kids ordered chocolate milk. Normally, a kids drink isn’t that big, but these milks were in a beer sleeve. Seriously? We are in an airport waiting for a flight, and my kids were just served a huuuuge glass of chocolate milk. Of course their eyes went wide with excitement.

We placed our order. For the kids we only wanted a plain hamburger and fries, but there was no plain burger on the menu . The closest thing they had was a $16 bacon cheddar burger. No deals were offered. Sue then noted that the BBQ burger was $15 and got the waitress to order that instead, and skip everything on it. Wow. Pretty bad service so far.

When the food came, they brought the wrong dishes. My burger had fries, when I had ordered a salad. Sue’s wasn’t right either. The food server (not our waitress) disappeared and shortly came back with the right food. That was a little suspicious.

Now we had three plates of food, but absolutely no cutlery. We had to ask for at least one set to cut the kids’ burger. The waitress came by so we asked for another plate and cutlery/napkins for all of us.

The waitress then disappeared for a while and never checked in on us. Now we weren’t tight on time, but I just wanted to eat and get out of there. Sadly for me, my burger was very “meh”. The patty was barely warm, yet somehow the cheese on top was melted??? The onion rings on it were crispy, but cold??? The BBQ sauce was dribbled on top and lacked any real flavour, and definitely had not been cooked at all. All in all it was bad.

I should have said something to the waitress, but again, I just wanted out. At this point I started thinking about the absurdity of it all. I looked around, and out of the 50+ tables, I only saw two menus. I saw the hostess again motioning for people to follow her, without speaking a word. I saw the lineup of about 8 groups, yet at least 10 tables free. I saw the same hostess seating people at dirty tables, then half cleaning things up after the people were seated.

I saw the wait staff rushing around looking busy, but really not doing anything useful. Someone outside the restaurant wouldn’t make any sense of this, but me being on the inside, experiencing it became quite funny.

I snagged the waitress and asked for the bill. When we got it, we saw it was $65 and change. Holy shit! That is crazy. Three burgers and two beer. Sue and I discussed the quickest, easiest, and least friendly way we could get out of the restaurant. We managed to find enough cash and left $67 on the table. Sorry, no real tip for this place. They definitely got what they deserved.

Next time we will hit the food court for Subway where we will get the same crappy service, semi-ok food, for 1/3 the price. Granted, we couldn’t get a beer at Subway, but really, the beer wasn’t worth the price of admission.