You know how sometimes you just know what is going to happen? Yet you trudge ahead, ignoring the warning signs? This weekend, we decided to have lunch at Bistro 245 at the Westin. I still have some buy-one-get-one-free places on my Woman’s Club Restaurant Card, which expires in June, so I thought I’d check out some of those places. My original choice, Croissants de France, had a long wait so we biked on over to the Westin.
Knowing that Sunset Key is run by the Westin, and since we had such a crappy experience at Latitudes, I was cautiously optimistic that this lunch would be more successful. We arrived very hot and in need of a beverage, but were told by the hostess that they were only serving brunch. If we wanted lunch, we could sit at the bar. Not a great start, but that is my fault for not doing the research to find out when they serve what meals. Nonetheless, we seated ourselves at the bar.
The bar stools are quite comfortable, and have plenty of leg support, even for my just-operated-on knee. Once we sat down the bartender stared at us and grunted “What do you want?”. I said that we would like to see the lunch menus, please. At this point it would have been helpful for him to offer us some water and more than one menu (there were two of us). He tossed a menu onto the bar and walked away, returning moments later, with silverware which was literally thrown at us. It wasn’t even clean. There was still food stuck to the fork. I’m not sure what I expected since Mr. Bartender could not be bothered to even wipe off the bar (where there was also leftover, crusted-on food) when we sat down.
This is not one of those long, drawn out stories of bad service, however, because it was at that point (no water, dirty silverware, surly bartender) that we left. I simply will not suffer through a bad meal, when it can be avoided from the beginning.
On another note, I have heard that the folks at Latitudes have hired some competent new managers. Hopefully they can affect change in a positive manner. Time will tell.
