This is not a review. It was going to be, but things happened. I had brunch with four friends at Evangeline’s Bistro and Music House. I’ve had brunch there before, and was happy with the food, the service, and of course the music. I wrote about that here.
But:
Our food arrived 90 minutes after our reservation time, 85 minutes after we sat down. Our table of five did get beverages during that time, and we saw a two-top seated after us eat and leave before our food arrived. The inside was full, and the outside was busy also. It wasn’t the servers’ fault; they were flying around constantly. My friends remarked that this had happened to them on their last visit a couple of months earlier but that they’d thought it was a one-time glitch.
The bananas Foster stuffed French toast could have benefited from a longer bath in the egg batter to soften up the bread’s crust, but otherwise was quite tasty. The glazed bacon is thick and high-quality, chewy rather than crisp. And the coffee was passable.
It turned out to be a gobble ‘n run meal for me, so no tasting around (except from some nicely-seasoned Brabant potatoes). But that wait was completely unacceptable. It was the crowning touch after the manager’s thousand-mile stare as he avoided the hostess-less hostess, people lining up out the door waiting for the empty tables, plus his insistence that it was impossible that the host of our group had made a reservation with a specification like inside/outside or table/booth, because they never accepted such restrictions.
If this had been a one-off, well, everyone has shifts from hell. But if it’s a recurrent problem – and asking around after this experience, I heard more stories – then it’s not respecting the people who are paying for everything in the restaurant and who hope for a good experience. There are places who think that customers will come anyway. I surely hope Evangeline’s isn’t going to turn into that kind of a place. It has too much going for it otherwise.
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