And now, I shall rant about Amici's...

So my friend and I went to Amici's before the Sharks game tonight, as we've done on previous occasions, and were looking forward to a relaxing meal. And it started out okay. The hostess sat us outside and it was nice and cool. I said hi to some other friends sitting inside and everything was jolly and perfect.

Our waitress was a little over the top when she came to the table, thinking she was much funnier that she was, but we just went with it. Her makeup was a little scary and we were afraid she might pop right out of her top due to it being way too tight, but we let that go too. She brought us our drinks, we ordered some bread and then waited. The bread arrived fairly quickly and we ordered our meals. That's when the fun began.

To be fair, we both ordered something not actually on the menu, but it didn't seem that hard. My friend wanted a dish normally served with linguine to be served with penne. The waitress wrote it down and it seemed like a slam dunk. I just wanted some plain penne with garlic and olive oil and maybe a little parmesan. So, I asked for a bowl of penne with said garlic and olive oil and parmesan and seriously, she looked at me like I had two heads. I was like, "Is that possible? To just get plain penne?" And her response was, "So you want a bowl of penne?" "Yes," I said. "With olive oil, garlic and parmesan." This went back and forth again and finally we discovered that the issue was my use of the word bowl. Apparently ordering a BOWL was the hard part. I was like, "Yeah, I don't care what sort of dish it's in. If it was at my house, it would be in a bowl." "Oh, okay."

Wow.

Our food arrived and mine was right, but my friend's was wrong. It came with the linguine. I don't think I need to tell you that it wasn't our server that delivered it but a runner of some sort. When we told him the problem he was like, "Uh, okay, who's your server?" We described her and he left. And left the incorrect dish in front of my friend. I started to eat mine and holy hell was there was lot of garlic in it. I seriously think they roasted a head of garlic, pureed it then squeezed it onto the pasta from a pastry tube. It was crazy!

Time goes by, as does half of my meal, and there is no sign of our waitress or my friend's dinner, until, that is, I see another runner carrying a dish that looks suspiciously like the one already sitting on our table towards us. I then see our server intercept him and tell him that it's supposed to be penne. Yeah. They remade it wrong. Meanwhile, no one ever came to say anything to us like, sorry, or we're re-doing it, or anything. It was several more minutes when the correct dish was delivered by yet another person, and there was no sorry or anything, just the delivery. They also didn't remove the incorrect dish, so it sat there feeling neglected.

Our server did finally happen by after a while and say, "Oh I see you got your penne." That's it. Nothing about being sorry or anything. She didn't ask us how we were doing or if we'd like something more to drink. Nothing. Her tip was long gone at that point.

We finished eating and waited for our check and I kid you not, in the span of 10-15 minutes our server walked by three, maybe four times and didn't once stop or even look in our direction. When we'd had enough we got up, went back inside and asked the hostess if we could speak to the manager. 

Now typically, when you explain what's happened to a manager, they offer to comp your meal or provide you free dessert or something. They don't say, "So what would you like me to do for you?" Now he was nice about it, but I'm sorry, he should have just done something. Just fix it dude. Why should we tell you? 

In the end, we paid our bill, got two free desserts, and what we thought were two gift certificates for return visits. This was all well and good until we realized the gift certificates were for a large one-topping pizza, unusable on delivery and only valid Monday-Thursday. Really? We didn't even order pizza, so why did he think that was a worthy solution? I was going to just let it go, but now Amici's will be getting a complaint letter from me. 

I've never had such terrible service from them, but now they're totally tainted and I have no real interest in going back, at least not to the downtown location.

Thankfully the Sharks won tonight, and thankfully there was some fun during the game or my head might have actually exploded from the ridiculousness of the situation.