April 16, 2010, at 10:40 pm
The Mrs and I don’t eat out often, probably because we are diligently saving money for our future. Eventually, we would like to move from Miami into a colder climate and make a sizable down payment on our first house. When we are able to splurge, we usually visit a globally recognized chain restaurant, like you’ve seen in our previous Applebee’s, Chili’s and TGI Friday’s reviews. In keeping with the trend, we decided to go to our local Denny’s restaurant, located on Biscayne and 36th ave, about 2 miles north of downtown Miami.
We arrived around 7:00 pm ET and noticed right away that there was only one other family eating at that time. The location I mentioned above is extremely busy at almost every hour of a 24-hour day and I would have thought that this Denny’s would be buzzing on a Friday night, but the place was super dead. We were seated in one of the 1,000 open booths and checked out Denny’s new value menu that had a lot of choices at $2, $4, $6 and $8. The wife and I agreed on getting the sampler for an appetizer then I ordered the cowboy steak with cheddar mashed potatoes and hash-browns and she also ordered the cowboy steak (but with no onions) with sides of coleslaw and ranchero mashed potatoes. I would guess the orders were placed around 7:15 pm ET.
Well, 7:30 pm rolls around and our waiter was no where to be seen. We were getting worried because there is literally 3 other customers in the restaurant who arrived around 10 minutes after us and it’s at this time Mrs. Smith starts getting antsy. Another five minutes passes and she goes from antsy to angry. Five minutes after that, we are served the WRONG entrees. Not even the wrong appetizer mind you … the wrong entrees. So the three people sitting next to us received their meals first and right after that, we were given our meals. It would appear that the appetizer was forgotten about completely and with zero appetizer orders outside of ours, it was extremely disappointing.
So here we have our dinners but there’s another problem. Mrs. Smith no-onion steak was loaded with onions. To prevent her from throwing them around the room, I grabbed her plate and gave it back to the waiter. He said he put the order in with no onions and even tried to show me on the monitor where orders are taken but I didn’t care, I just wanted a steak with no onions. One minute later, the steak returned, obviously scraped free of visible onions. Problem #2 … there were still plenty of onions in the cheese and on the steak. The Medusa-like stare that I received from Mrs. Smith for the next 10 minutes would have turned any other man into stone I assure you.
The next twenty or so minutes were spent trying to calm her down from a rampage in Denny’s that would have killed only me, because I was the only one there. To be fair, the hamburger steaks were actually pretty good, as were the sides. The waiter, admitting defeat, gave us our check without even offering dessert and even though the meal was like Chinese water torture, I ordered the $2 pancake puff dessert. By far, the best part of the evening as it’s well proportioned and quite tasty. $19 and change bill because there was no appetizer and I strangely left a very high tip to round the total to $21.00. (10% was not deserved but at Denny’s you pay at the cashier and I was compelled to leave a dollar more than I should have)
The empty restaurant on what should be a busy Friday night should have told us to keep on walking but we didn’t listen. Mrs. Smith undoubtedly had a worse go of it than I did but her anger quickly turned into my anger and rightfully so. We only received half of our order … and even that was wrong! Sadly, I was a big fan of Denny’s before this incident and while we might still go to Denny’s in the future, one thing is for sure, the Denny’s on 36th and Biscayne in Miami should be avoided at all costs. Sometimes good food is worth the trouble but this isn’t even close.
