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Bad Service? Bad Food? Bad Review.
E-mail your own reviews to HeadPublicRestaurantCritic@gmail.com and have them posted.
Must Include:
1.) Your name (or nickname or handle or symbol or whatever)
2.) Pictures of the receipt or meal (or both) to prove that you actually ate at the place you're reviewing
3.) A rating: Great, Good, Satisfactory, or Sucks
4.) The date of when you ate there.
5.) The address of the restaurant.
6.) And, most importantly, your review, however you want to write it.
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Hello, and welcome to PublicRestaurtantCritic.com. The purpose of this website is to basically vent frustrations over crappy service and crappy food... that you paid for with your hard earn cash.
The genesis of this project started when I was eating a couple of days before Christmas '07 at a Logan's Roadhouse (ground zero of this website), and the service was just crappy. The waiter was not bad, he was just trying to do his job, but the general management and food was just atrocious. My family and I were not happy, but we really could not complain to the waiter, it wasn't his fault, and we could not complain to the manager, he couldn't change the past. Basically, we did not want to complain because, at that point in our meal, after we had sat through horrible service and already received our food (complete with previously frozen celery sticks and two orders of the same plate that somehow had different foods on them), complaining would not have helped at all. I was kinda pissed off that we had such a lousy time at Logan's, because people go out to dinner to get taken care of, not shit on -- restaurants are in the hospitality industry afterall. As I was leaving Logan's, I wished there was a website where I could go to post my complaints on a public forum, to let people know that Logan's was a crappy place to eat. I thought to myself, in my ideal world, there would be such a website. Since I couldn't find such a website, I decided to create my own. The project of this website is for people, the general public just like you reading this right now, to write in and share your feelings about the restaurants you frequent and eat at. You can write in a complaint about a certain restaurant, or you can write in a letter of praise for a favorite restaurant, to let other people know that that restaurant is worth checking out. The goal: To create a database based off of users' submissions to tell people which restaurants they should go to, and, most importantly, which restaurants they should avoid. To submit your own contribution, simply send an e-mail to HeadPublicRestaurantCritic@gmail.com with the following: 1.) A rating: Great (awesome service and food), Good (liked it), Satisfactory (decent service and food, but would go there again nevertheless), or Sucks (bad service and food; horrible experience, would not go there again). 2.) A description of why you think this restaurant deserves the rating you gave it. 3.) Pictures: At least one picture of your receipt (to ensure that you actually ate at the restaurant you are writing about, and maybe some extra pictures such as a picture of the meal and the outside building (camera phones are probably the easiest to use)). Again, the goal of this site is to not only vent your frustrations, but also to praise restaurants that need more publicity. One of the underlying hopes of this site is to build a database of great, small restaurants that people should visit that they might not have known about otherwise. Please, write in and help me build this database. As we get contributions, each state, and eventually each city, will have its own page with their own restaurants listed (hell, maybe we'll even make this international), so that anybody in any city will have a public resource to help them decide which restaurants to eat at and which ones to avoid. So please, write in to HeadPublicRestaurantCritic@gmail.com and lets get this site going. In the end, either one of two things will happen. 1.) This site will become of a mecca of restaurant information, with honest reviews and listings of those great hole-in-the-wall and mom-and-pop diners. 2.) This site will become a chronicle of just me posting reviews of all the restaurants I eat at hoping to get this site off the ground. Either option is fine by me.
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Latest Reviews
Austin, TX 78704 (512) 445-0000 |
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I keep on writing about my indifference towards Magnolia -- I don't really care for the restaurant much nor do I truly hate it, yet I keep coming back to it mainly because other people I know do like it, which resulted in this visit, which occurred after 2 am on a Saturday morning after a drunken bout on Sixth Street (the bar district in Austin).
Normally, I don't like to eat late at night or after I've been drinking because I just fall asleep shortly afterwards and buying/eating food during that time would just be a waste of resources, but my friends wanted to go to Magnolia and they were driving, so I went to Magnolia. To limit my cost I ordered a breakfast taco, their Big Breakfast Taco to be exact, which contains egg, avocado, bacon, and cheese in a flour tortilla. The taco was alright, but it was a pain to eat because it kept falling apart. Instead of packing the taco, the restaurant just placed the filling on half the tortilla and flipped over the other half. As I was eating the taco, the filling kept falling out and the flour tortilla kept tearing from the wetness of the egg and other fillings. Normally, tacos are meant to be a quick and efficient transportation method to get something into your mouth when done properly, which this wasn't. Once again, Magnolia was a bit of a disappointment, but I must be the only one to feel that way since the place was still packed from the late night crowd when we left at just after 3 am. |
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Austin, TX 78701 (512) 476-CITY |
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So Little City is a coffee shop in downtown Austin that also serves sandwiches, bagels, and other general things that most coffee shops sell, including beer. I went here for lunch in my continuing exploration of food options in the downtown area and decided to get a smoked salmon sandwich that included cucumber slices, pesto cream cheese, and greens on ciabatta bread for around $7 dollars before tax. It was a little bit pricier than I would have liked, but if you're eating at a downtown eatery, one won't find anything comparable for much less.
I'm kind of wishy-washy about ordering sandwiches from restaurants because I always feel that I'm over paying since I could conceivably make the same sandwich at home for much less, which is true if we're talking appropriate economy of scale, but normally when I decide to have sandwiches at home I buy all of this sandwich stuff that would cost less per sandwich if I were making like ten sandwiches, but normally I just make three or four sandwiches and then get tired of them, so overall I'm learning that in paying for sandwiches at restaurants I'm not really just throwing my money away. Also, I didn't really feel like I was wasting money because all of Little City's sandwiches are priced the same, so since smoked salmon normally costs more, I felt, in regards to the other sandwiches, that I was getting more bang for my buck by going for the salmon, which was delicious. Overall, this smoked salmon was delicious (as smoked salmon naturally is) and the sandwich it was part of was good as well. It also came with chips and salsa. However, I did feel like I should be getting more for my $7 than a sandwich, chips, and salsa, but I really don't know what I was expecting in the first place. Overall, not a bad place for the area. |
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Austin, TX 78701 (512) 478-3281 |
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I have taken it upon myself to sample all of Thundercloud Subs' weekly specials...
The special this half-month was their hot pastrami sandwich, which, when I first saw that it was on special, made me happy, cause it looked good and I like pastrami. Then I ordered it, and it was ok -- rather bland actually. The sandwich was just pastrami, cheese, and mustard, and bread of course. I thought that it would have come with the normal veggies and other stuff that they normally put on their other sandwiches, but nope, it was just the meat, cheese, mustard, and bread. Thundercloud called it their hot pastrami sandwich, which I guess was supposed to refer to the temperature of the meat because everything else wasn't hot, and even the meat wasn't hot either, but rather just lukewarm. For some reason I thought this sandwich was going to be awesome. It was not. |
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Austin, TX 78705 (512) 322-9168 |
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From my previous review of the Crown and Anchor, minus the "I wasn't planning on eating"-part: "I wasn't planning on eating, but then I got hungry, and I'm keeping track of how much money I'm spending on food and expenses (like gas) so that if the day ever comes that I make any money off of this site I could claim all of the food I eat as tax deductible, so given that, I decided to get a chessburger and fries."
The "chess"burger and fries were good. |
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Austin, TX 78704 (512) 445-0000 |
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So, the day after a rambunctious New Year's Eve, some friends and I decided to eat at Magnolia Cafe for our first meal of the new year. Generally, Magnolia is pretty good and well regarded in the Austin community, but this visit kind of sucked, not so much because of the food, but mainly for the way we were seated.
First of all, the food was alright. I had their #2 house special omelet (consisting of steamed mushroom, red onion, green bell pepper, ham and cheddar and jack cheese… oh, and egg too) with 'home fries' and an English muffin. I choose those sides because I didn't want toast (because it's boring when compared to an English muffin) or Spanish rice or fruit (because I'm pretty sure the fruit would have contained cantaloupe which for the life of me I can't force myself to like no matter how hard I try). Once upon a time I used to like home fries when I didn't have them all of the time, but now it seems like I'm eating them everywhere because more and more restaurants are serving them in their dishes because they are cheap and easy to make -- personally, I would have preferred the option to have hash browns. Overall, the food was good and plentiful... except that it became inedible after a few minutes because we were seated at the worst possible table at Magnolia on that particular day. Personally, I can't eat eggs once they cool down, something about the combination of the cold temperature and texture of the eggs just grosses me out, and half my meal became inedible because my omelet got cold. This visit to Magnolia sucked because of where we were seated. Magnolia is pretty popular, but it's a small restaurant -- add to the fact that we went on a holiday, New Year's Day, and one can imagine how busy and packed the restaurant must have been. I was in a party of five, one of whom put his name down with the hostess for a table; they asked whether we wanted indoor or outdoor seating or if either one was fine (meaning which ever one was available first we would get) -- we didn't care where we sat (or so we thought), so we said either one would be fine. Boy, were we wrong. When they called our name, we went up to the hostess's stand where they directed us through the inside of the restaurant, took us outside, through the outside dining area, and then took us outside the dining area to an outer outside area with some picnic tables, where they sat us at the table furthest from the restaurant. I'm not going to mince words -- this table sucked. First of all, when they asked us if we cared where we wanted to be seated, we didn't care, inside or outside, it didn't matter. Inside is great because it's temp-controlled and outside is good because it’s a patio area with plastic sheeting acting as wind blockers with strategically placed heat lamps keeping the area warm -- well, we were seated outside of this area with no plastic wind blockers and no heaters on New Year's Day, and even though we are in temperate Texas, it was still pretty fucking chilly with the wind chill only making things worse. The only reasons to sit outside were because we thought we would be on the patio with wind blockers and heated lamps, neither of which we were afforded at our table outside of the patio area. When we asked for a heat lamp, we were told that it would be a fire hazard because the lamps were tall and we were under a tent-like thing, which only served to cover the top of the table, not the sides. When we asked if we could switch tables (because our table really sucked), the magnolia staff told us that we had opted to sit inside or outside, whichever was first available, when we had given them our name and for them to reseat us now meant we would have had to wait all over again -- newsflash: we initially opted to sit inside or outside, not outside the protected and heated outside patio area. Overall, the food was alright, but the seating very much sucked. Now that I'm thinking and writing about the experience, I think the worst part of it was that the workers we were complaining to knew we were right, but were just saying "you all elected to sit outside so there's nothing we can do" as a lame defense, and to reiterate my point, yes, we elected to sit outside, but we did not elect to sit outside the outside. To add insult to injury, the waitress added her gratuity to our bill when we were just a party of five (I thought restaurants normally didn't add gratuity unless you had six or more people in the party at the least) -- I'm thinking she did this because she could tell from our complaining and discomfort that we weren't really in the tipping mood. To add more insult, the gratuity was 17%, where at most places its 15%. In sum, I generally like Magnolia's (which is why this review is getting a satisfactory rating instead of a sucks rating), and I know I'll probably be back in the future, but I'm definitely specifying where I will not sit the next time I put my name on the waiting list. P.S. There's a store next door that you can browse or buy from when waiting for your table (they have a p.a. system from Magnolia’s in the shop so that you can hear when your name is called). The shop is for tourists and filled with crap that no self-respecting person would fork over money for unless they're bored as hell waiting for their name to be called over at Magnolia. P.S.S. Horrible, horrible seating. |
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N. McAllen, TX 78504 (956) 631-7344 |
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On December 23rd, I went out with my parents and brother to Logan's Roadhouse in McAllen, Texas. There was the usual wait, but things started to go down hill when we were seated. The waiter was nice, but incompetent -- the real problem was the food and overall service.
1.) My dad ordered a bowl of chili as his entree, but as we were being served our food, the waiter apologized and informed us that they were out of chili, as, let me state again, we were being served out food. The waiter should have told us they were out of chili as he was taking our orders or shortly thereafter. Granted, the waiter might not have known himself that they were out of chili, but someone, a cook at least, should have notified him when they got our orders. 2.) My mom ordered an appetizer platter, which included celery sticks to compliment the buffalo wings, but the celery sticks were DECOMPOSING. Either they had been frozen or they were old, but the were turning to gloo. 3.) In place of the non-existent chili, my dad ordered an appetizer platter, just as my mom had did. The appetizer is supposed to come with 3 different items (my mom's did) but my dad only got 2 different items. The waiter did not say why, so we had to ask why, when we had ordered 2 of the same plates, they come back looking different. The waiter said that they ran out of one of the items, which is understandable (somewhat), but unacceptable in relation to the shitty service we also received from the restaurant as a whole. Overall, I will never eat at a Logan's Roadhouse ever again. The waiter apologized for the service and food saying that they had just finished serving a big party, explaining why some of the food was out of stock, but still, its a restaurant, and they are supposed to be prepared for almost anything. Shitty service and shitty food equals a bad review. No more Logan's for me, ever. |