An hour or two ago, I was looking at Yelp reviews for the restaurant Traders, which we visited this weekend in Chesapeake Beach. Traders has 3 stars on Yelp (which is not very good) and was panned by me. Imagine my delight when I came across the following review, from last month:
Went there tonight with family. Had salad and to my surprise there was a drink cup lid in bottom of salad. Makes you wonder what else falls in your food. Pointed it out to waitress , manager never came to table. Think I will pass next time.
A drink cup lid! I love it! I noted in my post that the lights were kept strangely low in this restaurant, so low that even the waitress was complaining about it. Perhaps, if the lighting were better, the server (or the cook!) might have noticed the drink cup lid before serving it to the customer. It's these little details that matter.
So, I now feel inspired to find and post some of the best-worst Yelp reviews of places we have visited on this blog and been unimpressed by. (Out of fundamental loyalty, I will leave out my own restaurant, which has some doozies of its own, believe me.)
So, I now feel inspired to find and post some of the best-worst Yelp reviews of places we have visited on this blog and been unimpressed by. (Out of fundamental loyalty, I will leave out my own restaurant, which has some doozies of its own, believe me.)
Olazzo, Silver Spring, MD, 4 stars-- our thoughts here:
"my girlfriend described the raviolis as tasting like "chef boyardee"
"Can't remember what my friends had but they were nonplussed by the food. "
"Some might read this review and say "dang this girl drank some haterade"...but low key drinking haterade may have tasted better than this food."
District Commons, Washington, DC, 3.5 stars (but with oh-so-many haters)-- our thoughts here:
"Ordered the quinoa, and I kept biting down on hard pieces of foreign matter. Eventually I fished one of these pieces out of my mouth and it was a tiny piece of broken glass. It was transparent with jagged edges.
When I showed the manager she acknowledged the broken glass and profusely apologized. She took away the dish but when she returned changed her tune. She was suddenly very confident that there was not and had never been any glass in my food. The problem, as she put it, was that the quinoa was just "very organic". Sometimes, she said, there's sand that gets in the quinoa because their quinoa supplier is so darn natural and actually, this happens frequently so there's no need for me to worry. Then she offered to get me a new entree free of charge or perhaps even a free desert. {...}
But even if the foreign matter was just sand (it wasn't), that still doesn't explain or excuse anything. I mean, who the hell goes serving people food that "frequently" has rocks in it?"
"The pretzel bread is great and the pimento cheese fritters are awesome. But be prepared to get the horrid look that we got when the salad went to the wrong person. I thought that he would put the butter knife in my eye!"
"If you want to be trolled by staff while eating very pedestrian food at silly prices, this is your place. "
The Tally Ho, Potomac, MD, 3 stars-- our thoughts here:
"The owners son should not be able to be there on his own. He is an ahole with zero people skills. I play poker with his father so i go here for breakfast 8 to 10 times a year. No more after this morning. No chance they stay in business if they r counting on him to take reigns. Too bad i have been going there since it was in the back of the old drug store. Too many other choices these days to have a spoiled punk spit obscenities at me."
The Tastee Diner, Silver Spring, MD, 3 stars-- some of our thoughts here, though this restaurant is a special case. We go there pretty often, sometimes it's really awful and other times pretty good, and we have affection for it even though it kind of sucks:
"...the smell was that of stale maple syrup freshly wiped with a sub-par cleaner with a cloth that surely has not been washed for a month."
"I've had a a server once who was more drunk than I was..."
"The food is as consistent as middle eastern peace, you don't know how long any given amount of quality will last."
"the wait staff could be from a pool of newly paroled non-violent convicts, but they get the job done."
"Yeah it's clean, but the floors are often wet and someone is always mopping, you get the sense someone made a disgusting mess somewhere RIGHT before you came in, it has this damp humid kinda feel to it on the inside, the ceilings are low, and the whole place smells like syrup (was i the only one who had an elementary school that smelled like syrup?)."
"We went at about 11 in the morning and our waiter was either drunk or really wanted to be. While you'd think this would be annoying, it turned out that he was really funny and friendly (accept he really wanted some booze). He told us that if we gave him a bottle of liquor the meal would be on the house and kept claiming that he takes a sip out of everyone's beer before he gives it to them....we believed him. While it was all very bizarre, it was endearing in a really horrifying way."
"...my 80 year old date looked younger than most of the patrons dining and about half of the waitresses here. "