My friends and I decided to check out Kiss Cafe last Friday night. I had read reviews on DigitalCity and CitySearch warning about slow service, but we figured we were going for drinks and now bad could drink service be? Famous last words. When we got there, there were only two other parties there, yet it took the waitress forever to serve us. Then she messed up my friend's drink order and proceeded to argue with her about it. At another point, we just went to the bar to order because the table service was bad, and even though our server saw us standing there, she turned on the Flavor Flav reality show to watch it instead of checking to see if we needed anything. After a while, we decided to order food, because we got hungry waiting for the drinks. That was a lost cause. The food was eventually served and when we asked for condiments (sour cream for nachos, BBQ sauce for chicken strips...nothing fussy!) they acted like we were asking some monumental task of them. Then the manager came over to ask why we didn't leave a tip (even though when he came by earlier in the night we told him that we were missing a bunch of stuff and no one had came to bring us new drinks in 45 minutes). When we told him, he told us, sorry, they were busy...we pointed out that they were only busy for about 30 minutes of the 3 hours that we were there, and the service was bad throughout. He then apologized and asked what he could do, but didn't offer to do anything. A good manager doesn't leave it up to the customer to decide how to rectify a situation of his own staff's doing.
It is unfortunate because the atmosphere is cool, the drinks are great, and they are reasonably priced. Plus, the location has free garage parking on the weekends. The food was also good. But the service is SO bad that it is not worth the effort. I've never not left at least a partial tip, and two of my friends currently wait tables as a second job and have sympathy for waitstaff, but we could not bring ourselves to reward that.
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