Community Update

I live and work in Morristown ... so I figured I would try this restaurant. I entered excited at the prospect of a new and different place in town. Our waitress sat us and we asked for our bottle of wine to be opened. I had not seen my friend in a while as she came from out of town. We were catching up. We were interrupted at least 3 times (that is conservative) to see if we knew what we wanted for dinner, each time saying we have not looked at the menu and we would let her know when we were ready ... that didn't seem to work so we ordered. Our appetizers arrived and we were eating/talking ... the waitress came over and mid bite of our plate of appetizers put her hand out to take our appetizers THAT WE WERE EATING and said "your entrees are ready so I'm going to take this" literally as we were eating it she tried to take it. We stopped her and said no you aren't we are eating. She walked away and we looked at eachother in complete confusion. Honestly .. has that every happened to you before?? In 51 yrs no waitress has ever done that to me. But it gets better ... a server then comes about 5 mins later with our entrée and proceeds to do the same thing .. take our appetizer. Ok so we got past this and tried to move on. After we finished our entrée we were asked if we wanted anything else. We said no - and we were handed the check with this message "my manager wanted me to tell you that there is another party waiting for your table so if you could pay ASAP we'd appreciate it. Mind you we were not sitting at the table for 3 hours - our reservation was for 6:15 and it was 7:40. I was in shock .. we had a full glass of wine in front of us and we had just spent approximately $80 on dinner since the entrées range in price from approximately $21.95 to $26.95 .. Not that the price of our entrée should dictate good vs bad service. We were so uncomfortable that we rushed through our glass of wine.

The next day (Sunday March 23rd) disturbed by the service I called the restaurant and spoke to a girl that answered the phone and I explained that I wanted to speak to the manager when he had a chance. Gave her my phone number and she assured me I would be called .... Received no call.

Wednesday March 25th I called again .. same scenario as above. But received no call from the manager.

Saturday March 29th around 11am I called the restaurant again but I got an answering machine so I left a little more detailed message stating that I had been in the restaurant on Saturday I called on Sunday to speak to a manager and gave my name and number to the girl that answered, same thing on Wednesday and still no one has called me. I also said that I wasn't sure what bothered me more, my service on Saturday and the actual reason I am calling or the fact that I have called 3x and no one has called me back.

Yep .. you got it .. no call.

8:30 that night I am furious so I go online and see that David Byrne the owner also owns the next door restaurant Brick Oven .. so I call and ask to speak to him. The girl that answered asked what I was calling in reference to and I said "your service next door" .... She took my name and number and like clock work I get a call from the manager who states that he never got any of my messages! LOL right ......... such a good excuse for dropping the ball and here is why I say that .. after he proceeds to tell me he never got my messages, he would never allow a staff to speak to a customer like that, he's been in the restaurant business for 100 years (I'm obviously exaggerating), he knows how to treat customers, had I told him that night he would have fired the waitress ... and the list of scenarios, apologizing, excuses etc goes on. Basically he blamed him not calling me back on his staff. He told me and I quote "I promise you I will get to the bottom of this if I have to go over every inch of tape because we have cameras everywhere and I promise I will call you before the end of the day tomorrow (Sunday March 30th) ...

Ask me if he called me? The answer would be no. So in reality does he actually expect me to believe that he never got my messages? Good job Havana on making sure I will never step foot in your restaurant again and I will be sure to spread the word to the 300+ residents of this town that I know .......