City Steam Brewery Cafe
Hartford, CT
Though we have had a recent run of bad luck
on the good restaurant front,
it hasn't been all bad. The time we had
dinner at Max Downtown, I
was positively giddy after the first conversation
we had with our server.
Even though we had no reservations and had
to sit in the "Tavern" section
(read: by the bar), we still received the exact
same quality of service that
the rest of the diners were receiving. Right off
the bat she asked us if
we were going to the show, and we were! We
were going to the show!
And the restaurant wasn't even very close to
the theater! She wanted to time
the meal right so that we weren't rushed, but
still had time to make it!
(I was giddy, I told you.)
When you go out to dinner, you want someone
to take care of you. The goal
is to relieve your mind of stress, not to worry
about whether you'll have
to ration your ice water or if your server will go
AWOL. This past Saturday,
we went out to dinner at the City Steam
Brewery Cafe, where we were
beyond taken care of. Our waitress,
Krazy Mary (hey, that's the name
that was on the check!) was beyond efficient,
literally running, at
times, to the kitchen to get orders. Our drinks
arrived mere minutes after
we ordered them, even though we were on the
third floor and the bar was on
the first. When more than a few minutes had
lapsed between the time that
we ordered and the time that the appetizers
were brought out, Mary stopped
by our table to let us know that there was a
private party of 160 people
downstairs, but they were doing the best that
they could to get the rest
of the dinners out in a timely fashion. The ice
water had a slice of lemon
in it. But the piece de resistance was
this:
We noticed that two tables down from us,
someone was smoking. Since we had
asked to be seated in the non-smoking
section, we asked a
busboy/server-in-training if we were, indeed,
seated in the non-smoking section.
No, he said, this is the smoking
section up here. Do you
want me to ask them to put it out? Since
we couldn't smell the smoke,
we told him not to worry about it. Five or ten
minutes later he came back
to our table to tell us that he had checked and
found out that they had had
the seats mismarked as non-smoking on the
restaurant seating chart. Five
or ten minutes after that, our server, Mary,
came over to apologize and explain
that in the early evening, the section where we
were seated is designated
as non-smoking, but as it gets later it changes
into a smoking section. A
couple of minutes after that, the
maitre'd of all people comes
to our table to apologize for the mixup. At that
moment, someone at the table
right next to us lights up a cigarette, and she
immediately says that she
can move us to another table if we'd like. We'd
like. (I'm not a staunch
anti-smoking person, but I cannot, for
the life of me, imagine why you
would feel the need to smoke a cigarette and
eat your appetizer at the
same time.)
So we moved to a non-smoky table, we got
our food, and it was good. We were
astonished and impressed that an
unprecedented three people had
apologized
for an inconvenience. We felt like someone
was in control of our relaxing
dinner out. We had no worries. For this we feel
that the City Steam Brewery
Cafe (which, I might add is not a four-star
fancy gourmet doily-and-fine-china
restaurant where you expect - and pay for - that
level of service) deserves
a big gold star -- the shiny foil kind.
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