My First Bad Restaurant Review

Tonight several of us from the office braved the raging rains and, later, raging flood waters to enjoy a few drinks at a restaurant not far from our office. A few highlights:

• Stephanie asked our waitress if the bartender could make a Cosmopolitan. The waitress said, "A what? A Cos-MO-politan?" Stephanie wisely ordered a Smirnoff Ice instead.
• Darlene asked what the "Rocky's Chicken" sandwich was and the waitress said it was a fried chicken sandwich. When it was ready, the waitress brought the sandwich to her and said, "They don't fry it anymore. Is that alright?" and placed the grilled chicken sandwich in front of Darlene. Darlene was a sport and ate the sandwich but the place was quickly losing it's already marginal appeal for us.
• Lela ordered a gin and tonic and was brought a drink which she said "didn't taste right." She gave it back to the waitress who promptly came back and told Lela, "We're out of tonic." They had deliberately substituted her tonic with God knows what and tried to get away with it. This was 6:00 p.m. and they were already out of tonic.
• Shannon ordered a Bud Light twice and got regular Budweiser twice. When one of the other girls ordered a Bud Light for Shannon, the waitress looked at Shannon and said, "Oh, you switched on me?"
• Christy tried to order a Macallan scotch from the waitress, gave up and went to the bar. After talking to the bartender and determining she didn't know a single malt scotch from a vanilla milk shake, Christy finally ordered a Glenlivet and water. Her second Glenlivet and water looked somewhat like Lela's first gin and "tonic." Sure enough, when it was time to order a third Glenlivet and water, we were told they were out of Glenlivet. At this point (it was only about 8:00 p.m.), Lela looked at the waitress and then looked at the bar and said, "You know that area over there (pointing to the bar), that would be a good place for a bar."
• From our table, we could see some tables set out on the patio with plates already on the tables obviously for some festive function. There was a squirrel scampering amongst and across the plates.
• When Stephanie and Lela bravely decided to try the Cosmopolitans after all, they said they were actually pretty good. The kicker was that, before they could get another one, the waitress had to take their empty glass to refill it. There didn't seem to be anyone else in the bar drinking out of martini glasses so we could only assume that the whole bar only had two martini glasses.
• The first stall in the ladies room was plugged up and had a HUGE floater in it. Once again, this was early in the afternoon and the place was not that busy.
• In the hallway on the way to the bathroom, there was a humongous dead roach lying legs up on the floor. In the three hours we were there (yes, we were only there three hours), not one single person on the waitstaff noticed the huge cockroach?!

We left in a torrential downpour. Stephanie and I followed each other home until I chickened out and pulled over into a parking lot at one point because I was afraid to drive any further. I called Stephanie after a while, totally prepared to spend the night in that parking lot, to see how far she got and she told me I had already driven through the worst of the flooding so I left my little island sanctuary and came home.

As always, the conversation and the gossip were good. Our venue choice was not so good. I wasn't going to name the place but, if you've read this far, you deserve to know. It was Rocky's Roadhouse on North Eleventh Street.