Ricardo's Italian Cafe, St Louis

We are members of a dinner club that has been meeting monthly for several years now with the goal of sampling various St. Louis area restaurants. This provides member couples with the opportunity to discover and continue to patronize worthy candidates. Last night Ricardo’s Café in the Lafayette Square area had the opportunity to showcase their food and service. Unfortunately, it failed miserably on several accounts. To be fair, our group last night was made up of 15 individuals and that can be a challenge for smaller restaurants to handle. We do typically tolerate service shortcomings in these situations. However, Ricardo’s took last night’s situation to a different level. It can only be described as either a total lapse of business sense and ethics or ignorance. Let us start out by pointing out that prior to last night’s incident the reservation and a request to split checks for this large group was made and agreed to two months ago. The arrangement was confirmed when the final head count was given just a few days ahead of time. The service staff was reminded of that at the time the orders were placed and agreed that this was possible one way or another. On all other occasions if the restaurant does not split the final check outright, as a courtesy they typcially will compute and provide totals to individual couples and allow them to settle their bills. This was the least we expected and there’s never been an issue with doing this before with full acceptance of a preset service charge at all other restaurants. Last night, however, this became a challenge for the waitress. Again, this can be forgiven, as she was either very busy, not that we could tell, or 2nd grade level math might not be her strong suit. She called upon the manager/owner/cook to help with settling the bill. After more than 1/2 hour of fumbling with numbers it was obvious to our group that we weren’t going to be able to leave this restaurant any time soon. At this point we requested that the owner simply split the balance and let us go at which point he proceeded to express that he wanted us out of the restaurant and to never come back. I must add that the bus girl had more business sense and courtesy as we were leaving than the rest of the restaurant staff, including the owners. Maybe they should leave customer relations to the bus girl and stay in the kitchen if they want to remain in business. Given this behavior and adding that food was OK but not stellar by any means and that the service was spotty at best our only recourse is to let the public be aware that this establishment cannot handle parties that require more than one check. By the way, other than a nominal balance refused by the owner we paid all our checks.