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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
Center Suite C Austin, TX 78745 (512) 326-5807 |
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Currently, I have one of four ratings that I give restaurants based on a visit: Great, Good, Satisfactory, or Sucks. After visiting DK Sushi for the first time, I find myself compelled to add a fifth rating, between Satisfactory and Sucks, and that rating is Mediocre, which is exactly how I felt about DK Sushi.
First of all, DK Sushi has a horrible location in a small strip mall, which is in a weird location itself. If I was a better writer I might more accurately convey the setting, but I'm not. All I can say is that when I first saw the location, I was like "There's a sushi place there?" Anyway, onto the menu. I ordered a wonton soup as an appetizer, and then, for my entree, a yellow tail roll and an Alaskan roll. The soup was good, but it would have been better if I had received it when my meal-mate got his appetizer, and not 10 minutes later. The yellow tail roll was good. The Alaskan roll was disappointing, which might have been my own fault. The menu describes the Alaskan roll as "Special California Roll with Fresh Salmon". Now, the way I interpreted the description was that I would be getting a California roll (crab, cucumber, and avocado) with salmon on top. What I received was a roll with salmon, cucumber, and avocado. I was like, "What the fuck." In my mind, a California roll implicitly includes crab, so I was kind of pissed at the absence of that ingredient. This confusion of terms is probably my fault for having false or misleading expectations, but still, my enjoyment of this restaurant was hampered by this failure in communication, which was real. Some other nitpicks bothered me about this restaurant. The service was kind of spotty -- not bad, but not really that good either. Also, my meal-mate and I had several plates of sushi between us, but the wasabi and ginger were only included on one of the plates; normally, I'm accustomed to wasabi and ginger being on every plate of sushi and not having to share (although, to be fair, this might be due to me dining alone all the time). This restaurant wasn't that great. I didn't go in with high expectations, but even the expectations I formed from their menu alone were let down. This place definitely doesn't suck, but I don't feel that it is quite satisfactory, so I'm gonna have to deem it mediocre. |
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Austin, TX 78745 (512) 416-WING (9464) |
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I first discovered Wing Stop my freshmen year in college, in Richardson, Texas. Oddly enough, one of my roommates at the time, a vegeterian no less, was the one that turned me onto the restaurant. We were out and about one day (I think we were going to Blockbuster or something), a Wing Stop was close, and he wanted to go because he liked their fries, so we went and I got some wings while he just got fries. The wings were good, not great, but not bad. After that first encounter, I started treating myself to Wing Stop (take-out only, I never ate there because I didn't want to look lonely and have people pity me) for special occasions, which at that time meant after every test I took.
Flashfoward a couple of years, I move to Austin from Dallas, and there are no more Wing Stops, yet. Eventually Wing Stop started making their way down south, and now Austin as several Wing Stops. I visited the one off of William Cannon, ordered some wings, and ate alone (I'm not scared anymore to eat alone and have people pity me bitches!!!). Anyway, what I really liked about this visit is that Wing Stop now has a 10 wing combo for $8.99, where you get to split the wings between two flavors and also get fries, a drink, and dip (ranch or bleu cheese), which is pretty awesome for wings (which admittedly are kind of expensive to begin with for some reason unknown to me). I got the mild and garlic parmesan flavors, and they were good. The fries were alright -- I remember them being better and having a hint of sugar, but these fries were still alright. One of the unusual things for me this visit was that I walk in and see mainly black workers. Now, I'm not a racist, I believe that everybody is born equal in terms of pure unbridled potential, but I'm a realist. Sometimes black people (like hispanics and sometimes orientials) talk in slang and have to occasionally pull up their baggy pants when they take my order (at least at fast food restaurants), and I have to, but don't necessarily want to, adapt to that while I interact with them and pretend that I'm used to that shit... well, that didn't happen this time. These were some of the most professional, courteous, and nice workers I've dealt with in a long time. Kudos to them. |
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Austin, TX 78704 (512) 441-5446 |
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Ate at Polvos, and I liked it. It's a nice restaurant, and apparently extremely popular (although I had never heard of it before). The bad thing about the restaurant is that there's basically no fucking parking. The restaurant's parking lot is pitiful compared to how many people the restaurant can accommodate, so most visitors have to park in the adjacent residential neighborhood (I did at least; I had to park two fucking blocks away!)
But anyway, parking excluded, this is a nice restaurant with a large menu and a nice self-serve salsa bar. There were a couple of different salsas, my favorite being a dark garlic-y salsa, which was pretty good. Also available at the salsa bar were vegetables, carrots, onions, and jalapenos, that had been soaked in what looked like vinegar -- these were quite tasty as well (I'm guessing these were pickled vegetables of a sort). For my entree, I couldn't decide between "Pescado al Mojo de Ajo" ("Grilled Snapper intensely sautéed in Garlic and real Butter served along with our House Salad and Rice"), or "Chili Relleno Original" ("Chile Poblano Pepper stuffed with Cheese, Vegetables, Chicken or Ground Beef, topped with a special Red Sauce and Monterey Jack Cheese. Served with Rice, Beans and corn or flour Tortillas. (Fish or Shrimp available)". My problem is that I just started watching this food/cooking series on PBS Create, "Mexico: One Plate at a Time" with Rick Bayless, and I just recently saw episodes that focused on both pescado al mojo de ajo and chili relleno, so I was hungry for both of them, but I could only choose one. I ended up choosing the chili relleno with chicken, which was quite good and really fucking huge. I was expecting chicken stuffed into a small poblano pepper, but what I got looked like a mound of chickened covered in the skin of a poblano pepper (along with onion if I'm not mistaken), battered, covered in a tomato sauce, and topped with cheese. It really was quite good. I quite enjoyed Polvos, just wished they had better parking. |
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Austin, TX 78753 (512) 835-8889 |
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I don't think I've ever had Chinese bbq before, so First Chinese BBQ was a new experience for me. It was my friend's idea to go there -- he had mentioned that they have roast duck there and I told him that I've never had roast duck before and he said that I should try it and I said yeah and then we went there. I ended up ordering their "203" which their menu describes as "Barbecue pork and roast duck".
Their menu is pretty accurate as I was served a big plate full of barbeque pork and roast duck (we also got rice). The roast duck was pretty "succulent" (I don't really know the exact definition of this word, but it seems like it applies) and the barbeque pork, which had this light sauce on it that I can't really describe, was good as well. Overall, it was a good experience. I got a shitload of food for around ten bucks, the leftovers of which were the only thing I ate the next day (along with rice that I made myself), and the restaurant staff was very attentive, anticipating my coke refills before I even finished the current glass. I think I like this place better than Chinatown, and I think I'll definitely be back to try some of their other dishes. Succulent. (On second thought, that word sounds a like an ugly stripper’s name.) |
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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. |