I rarely write reviews, unless it's a really good or really bad experience...and even if it's bad, it takes a lot to get me to post about it. My family (9 of us) came here on vacation in Deep Creek Lake to get some dinner after a long day, and nearly everything that could be messed up, was...and no apology or solution was offered, not even a little.
The only reason I gave this place 2 stars is because the atmosphere is nice, and some of the servers are friendly in personality, but everything else from there was bad over and over. When our food came, all of it came at once which was nice - but all of them were cold. I don't mean lukewarm or not hot, I mean actually nearly chilled. I asked for the gravy to be on the side and it was poured over everything on the plate, my mom asked for lemon with her water and no lemon came, my sister asked for water for the kids to be in the kid cups and it was brought in regular tall glasses and the waitress said "this should be fine, unless they spill it on a phone or something", my dad ordered an English muffin and it didn't come, no rolls were brought for the table..... but worst of all, one of us ordered the tilapia and it was abysmal. Believe me, I am the first to admit I don't expect tilapia at a Perkins to be top notch, and that's fine. But this was truly laughable - I don't know how anyone would even serve that to a human. It was very tiny already, and it was shriveled to a point of non recognition, and whatever little bit was there had fallen apart everywhere. The rice it was on was cold to the touch. Also, at this point all food was brought, but none of us had silverware. OK. Annoying issues, and a lot.... but fixable. We said these things to our waitress nicely, but when we said "oh and none of us have silverware" she responded with "...ok". When we told them about the fish, we asked for a new reasonable fish, and for the cold food on the plate to be reheated. They took the plate, and brought it back a while later with a new better looking fish. All the rest of the food was colder than before, so that definitely wasn't heated. The fish was salty beyond edibility. The English muffin was never brought, but the worst part is we still had no silverware. We eventually got up and took it off other tables. By this point, we just wanted these problems to be fixed. We are still very reasonable people - we said something again about the muffin and that we got our own silverware, also about how cold the food was, and there were no apologies or anything, no attempt at trying to rectify the situation at all. After that we were being completely avoided at all costs, so needless to say we never got any drink refills. We had to track her down to ask again for the English muffin which she finally brought ten minutes later. I think what bothers me the most is the attitude the whole way through. We didn't even ask for ALL things to be fixed, just the major ones. She didn't split the bills up the way we'd all discussed at the beginning, and then the bill wasn't brought until 15-20 minutes past when she said she was going to go get it.
The cashier at the end asked "how was everything" to which my dad responded "well the food was ok, but the service was pretty bad". Her response to this was a nonchalant "ok" without any further inquiring about the situation that led to this answer. The impression I've gotten is that pretty much everyone that works there simply doesn't care about the quality of anything regarding this restaurant. Not the host, the servers, nobody we spoke to.
I want to note one more time that I'm seriously a laid back person and will usually overlook mistakes, even bigger ones...or nicely ask to fix the main one but not make a big deal. I'm the first to defend the waitress, the cook, whomever is the blame, that there's probably more to the situation we don't understand... But this entire experience was beyond me, I've never had something to this extent happen in one sitting. I was defending the restaurant to my family with each step, making excuses for them - but after enough things, lack of any apology whatsoever, and the attitude that us coming there to eat was a burden to their day was enough to really rub me the wrong way. I still feel bad writing a bad review because I know people have their bad days and such - but it was the overall experience at this place, not any one person, that bothers me. It is simply a poorly managed franchise. read more