Usually when we go out to eat it is for lunch on Saturday, but because of a conflict that day we instead went out to dinner at my mother-in-law's favorite establishment, Red Lobster. First off, we arrived around 5:00pm, and even though there were a number of empty tables, we were not seated for about 10 minutes and had to sit up front. That was not that big of a deal, but when we were seated it was in the back at a booth right next to the bar. At first that was not so big of a deal, but I will comment on that later.
After being seated at our booth our waitress showed up and greeted us. She was very friendly, but that soon shifted to being overly patronizing, mentioning how beautiful my mother-in-law's blue eyes were, and afterwards referring to her as "pretty blue eyes" whenever she returned. She referred to my 15 year son as "honey" which he definitely did not appreciate. Her attitude may have been forgivable if she actually gave us good service, but she brought our our cheddar bay biscuits before we even had drinks. Being as salty as they are, eating them without drinks is a big mistake!
The it was time to order and that was when we remembered that the Red Lobster dinner menu is much different than their lunch menu! Not only were the prices sky high, but many of the simpler offerings they have for lunch are simply not offered for dinner. My son wanted chicken fingers and they were not there, so he had to order them as appetizers. My mother-in-law just wanted plain fried shrimp, which was not there either so she ordered the jumbo coconut shrimp. My wife ordered a side of snow crab legs to go with an entree and I decided to go with the cajun chicken linguini alfredo.
Despite the restaurant not being very full, our order took a while to be served, and as we waited more people arrived at the bar until it was full. After it was full more people started congregating near the end of our booth, also taking up the booth next to ours and just stood there a few feet from us having drinks and talking. Now, I do not mind people having a good time, the problem was seating us practically next to the small bar when we could have been moved further away. In hindsight I guess we could have asked to move to a different table, but when we first arrived the bar crowd was not so large.
Finally, our food arrived and the waitress brought out the food for my son, my wife and myself. We sat there for a moment and the waitress said, "okay, that should be it", until we informed her that my mother-in-law had not received her shrimp. My son also did not have any dip to go along with his chicken tenders. After several minutes she finally did bring out the fried shrimp and had to add her "there you go, pretty blue eyes" which at this point was pretty irritating. My son ("honey") received a giant bowl of honey mustard sauce, which I guess was supposed to appease him.
Before we left she tried to appease us more by giving us some extra cheddar bay biscuits in a take home bag, complete with repeated comments on how good they were for breakfast with coffee. Sorry, that was not going to cut it. We will always have to remember not to go to Red Lobster in the evening for dinner.
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