Displeasing Gaucho Grill Palms

My friends and I had planned to go out and have dinner at the Argentinean restaurant, Gaucho Grill at the Palms Hotel. I was the first to arrive at 9 PM, and by 9:30 PM (thanks to Gulf Road traffic) we had all sat at a table and ordered our steak dishes. The place was half empty, but people came in and occupied the tables beside us soon after.

We were served with bread, drinks and starters while we talked and caught up with small chit-chat. We had several random discussions as we nibbled through the food and when we quieted down, we realized that we had finished everything and yet our plates remained empty on the table.

I tried to call the waiters for a beverage refill, but they all seemed preoccupied with other customers. One of them accidentally spotted me, came over to serve me, but didn’t bother to remove the empty plates nor glasses! “Excuse me, could you remove these please? We’re done. Thank you.”

We talked some more, then glanced around as the customers began to leave the restaurant and their tables were being cleared; they had already finished all their meals despite the fact that we had arrived earlier. The time was 10:50 PM and it was getting late.

“Our table has been empty. Where are our steaks?”, my friend asked the head server. “Five minutes!”, he nodded then ran off to a corner. This wasn’t the first time that we eat at Gaucho Grill, they definitely had better and faster customer service before.

We waited until it turned 11:20 PM and realized that if we were to ever get served, we’d be leaving the restaurant by midnight, and we simply didn’t have that much time on our hands. Our order was taken less than 2 hours ago and our table had been empty for far too long. “Yes, but there are many customers, and it takes time to cook the steak.”, they reason. “That’s true except people came in after us and already finished!”, we exclaimed.

We called the head server again and told them to cancel our dishes because it was too late and we had to leave. “Can we just have the bill please?” The server goes on to say that the food is ready and that it’ll be on the house, but we insisted that we must leave now.

We waited another 10 more minutes, but the bill also seemed to take its time to arrive, so we just left in the end.

Note: As I typed this, I read another complaint from the Fyonkat blog regarding their food being served cold.

Gaucho Grill really needs to sort out their service, otherwise more customers will walk out on them.