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From: [an eater]
Date: Friday, December 26, 2008
To: eater complaints dept.
Subject: Highly Unusual Experience at Allen & Delancey
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I am generally not the type of person writing to blogs to express my opinion. However, I have encountered an highly unusual experience recently at Allen & Delancey which I would like to share with you and see if other people have experienced a similar situation. I had been to A&D before and generally liked the place. Went back for dinner tonight and I have to say it has to be my worst experience at a NY restaurant over the past 7 years. We started at the bar with drinks and when our table was ready we were asked to settle our tab before we moved to the table. We did just that and waited for our drinks at the table for 25 minutes.
Our sea scallops appetizer (which by the way was good), arrived long before our drinks. Then we had to wait a good 10 minutes until someone cleared our plates and another 40 minutes until our main course arrived. And when they finally arrived, we were at the restroom and had to come back to cold (and mediocre) duck and risotto. When I went to the restroom I mentioned to the manager (David) that we had been waiting for a while and he offered no apologies, just excuses that they had an accident in the kitchen (he said something about the person who was supposed to prepare our food not being there?). Then the check arrived and the drinks we paid for at the bar appeared on the check again.
We complained to David again that our dinner was completely ruined by bad timing and bad service and again, no apologies. When he brought the corrected check, he said to us "don't ever come back to this establishment". I would like to note that we were really shocked as we were completely polite and all we wanted was for him to acknowledge their missteps. On our way out I asked David for his name and he responded by saying again "don't ever come back to this establishment". He said he was the owner but when I looked at their website it seems like the owner is Richard Friedberg. Just wanted to share this with you and see if you have had similar experience. This restaurant has 2 stars from Bruni and other good reviews but since the original chef has left I believe and the service seems to have deteriorated, I was wondering if someone needs to warn other people of recent developments.
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