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Bad Service? Bad Food? Bad Review.
E-mail your own reviews to HeadPublicRestaurantCritic a t gmail d o t 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) 462-3512 |
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Went to Freebirds and got a "Monster"-sized burrito -- the burrito was so big I felt a bit embarrassed eating it. The sad part is that Freebirds has a "Super Monster"-sized burrito, which is even more ridiculous.
My burrito contained carnitas, rice, pico de gallo, black beans, roasted corn, and some mixed cheddar-jack cheese, and probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting at the moment. I spent about $10 on my burrito and drink, and actually, for the price, the burrito is a decent value, as it'll yield me at least two meals. One thing I discovered on this visit is that Freebirds has a frequent eater card. I'm not sure how the points work for other menu items, but I got one point for my "Monster" burrito purchase. At 10 points, you get a free burrito, or you can save the points for bigger purchases. Now that I have a frequent eater card, it's almost certain that I'll be back to Freebirds. This is because I already have one point, and that one point has value, one-tenth of a burrito, but if I never use that one point, it'll be a waste, which is bad, so I have to use that point eventually, which means going back to Freebirds many more times, and the more times I go to Freebirds the more points I get, meaning the more potential value that I'll have that I don't want to squander, which means Freebirds has me hooked -- at least till I use all of my points. To be continued... |
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Austin, TX 78757 (512) 458-3700 |
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Went to Ichiban again and got the same thing that I always get, the sushi combination lunch special, with a shrimp tempura roll in place of the California roll. The meal was good, as usual. The special hand roll this time was four pieces of what I believe to be spicy crab, with avocado, fried, with two different sauces on top, one spicy (orange), the other sweet (black/brown).
Ichiban has their lunch specials from 11am to 2:30pm -- I usually elect to go during the later part of this period, in an effort to avoid the lunch crowd. On this visit, I was able to avoid the lunch crowd all together, during the latter part of my visit, when I was the restaurant's only customer, which was a bit weird. I normally don't like to be the focus of attention, but when you're the only customer in a restaurant, you're the focus. That being said, my waiter was really attentive, which was cool. Sometimes at Ichiban, the wait staff don't always notice an empty glass of water, but on this occasion, my waiter made sure I always had water, which was nice. |
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Austin, Tx 78723 (512) 928-3811 |
| Woke up hungover and wanted some tacos. I got an al pastor taco (which comes with pineapple) and a carnitas taco. I also got these tacos the last time I visited this place, but for some reason, it seemed like these tacos had more filling, with is nice. Anyway, the tacos and a Mexican Coca-Cola hit the spot. |
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Austin, TX 78705 (512) 236-0207 |
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I'm really digging Oishi's happy hour specials. This visit I was able to get a salmon roll and a "longhorn" roll for around $7 dollars.
The only bad thing about this restaurant is that it's located right next to the University of Texas at Austin, and thus I had to endure two young college girls talking and giggling about partying and drinking and boys as they ate $30 worth of food, which was quite annoying. *Sigh*, oh the innocence and ignorance of youth. But anyway, I like Oishi and I hope it sticks around. Oishi is located in the Dobie Mall, which previously housed "Sushi Caliente", which tried to fuse Mexican and Japanese food. That restaurant failed -- I hope because it was a stupid concept and not because there's a lack of market for sushi in this area. Mexican/Japanese sushi fusion -- seriously, wtf? (A quick aside, I ate at Sushi Caliente once, but didn't review it. The place was overpriced, and the person that took my order basically begged me to tell other people about the restaurant because they needed more business -- I didn't, till now.) |
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Austin, Tx 78752 (512) 323-9061 |
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Ate at Buffalo Wild Wings, and it was ok. I ordered a dozen wings, which I had split between two flavors, mild and spicy garlic. The mild was good, as was the spicy garlic, which lived up to its name. Also had blue cheese and celery, and some pints of Stella Artois. Now that I think about it, the meal itself was pretty good.
I think what bugged me about this visit was the restaurant itself -- it's hard to articulate in words, but it just felt, I wanna say depressing, but that's not quite accurate, so I'll just say dead. There were some customers, but the restaurant is so big that it just felt empty, like we should be somewhere else since everybody else seems to be. I should also note that my friends and I visited on St. Patrick's Day, and we choose to go to Buffalo Wild Wings because we assumed other places would be packed and that Buffalo Wild Wings wouldn't be so packed -- I guess we guessed correctly. But still, something felt odd about this place. The workers seemed, for lack of a better word, ghetto. There was this one buskeeper that kept walking around with a fake limp and his pants barely holding on to his ass. Our waitress was fine, she told us this was her third day waiting, but she kept asking us if we wanted more beers when our current beers weren't even half finished. On the plus side, she was attentive. The food was decent, but there was just this weird, empty, lackluster aura that permeated the building. This Buffalo Wild Wings occupies a building previously occupied by a now defunct Bennigan's, the ghost of which probably still lingers on the property. On the plus side, they had $2.75 pints of Stella, so I'll drink to that. |
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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. |