Terrible Staff Lacks Professionalism
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 5/10/09
My last visit there tonight, the evening of May 9, 2009 a was a particularly bad experience. My wife and I arrived early in the evening at approximately 6 PM. The restaurant was at less than 25% capacity. Tonight marked our 12th wedding anniversary.
The floor tables at Sardines are only about 2 feet X 2 feet square and so we were allowed to sit at two adjoining tables, by our request, as we usually order a lot of extras and are both large people. It was not a problem as there were empty tables in abundance all around because it was so early.
After we ate our appetizers and awaited our dinners to be served, and while we were enjoying our mixed drinks, a young man, seemingly in charge of Sardines this evening, approached our table with a hostess lady. The woman came to the table, handed my wife her bag and proceeded to remove the table telling my wife that they needed it. The young man stated that “We are overbooked and have a party coming and need this table. You are OK with this?” I told him I was not, and it went totally downhill from there. He implied that I would have to be OK with it and kept trying to get me to agree it was fine to burden us with his poor scheduling problems. What I feel I was a victim of was a lazy effort to find a table to use from among the many other empty ones there, and some good old fashion rudeness to what might have first been thought an easy to push around elderly couple. Wrong move mister!
The idea of handing my wife her bag while she was sipping her drink was truly bad manners, disrespectful, and extremely poor judgment on the part of the Sardines restaurant staff. member. The table was taken from us and moved about six feet away with a constant harangue from the young fellow about how it would just have to be, and he was sorry for the inconvenience, and he could see that I was upset, basically making a public showing of his position.
What really upset me was the fact of his condescending attitude, and the fact that there were literally dozens of unoccupied tables all around the facility, many of them being single tables, so I know that other empty tables could have been utilized from elsewhere except for the lazy factor..
Their poor planning should not be an excuse for rudeness, inconvenience to actively dining persons, and panic measures for an “emergency” that was nothing close to justifying the absurd situation, and I clearly told him so.
We asked for our check and promptly proceeded to pay for what we had consumed, canceling our dinner orders. On the way out, we were again confronted by the young man and he again tried to explain to me his reason for having to inconvenience my wife and I. Again, we exchanged words ad I was clear in telling him that there was no correct or justifiable excuse for poor service and his efforts to placate me with his “charm” was not helping matters. He himself did not know when to stop so I finally had to flatly tell him that further communication between us was finished so I could just get out of there as soon as possible.
Obviously, I will not recommend this restaurant to anyone in the near future. Instead, I will try to warn others of the sometimes obvious lack of professionalism and overly abundance of immaturity that was evident to myself and others in attendance at Sardines Ristorante Italian , 509 University Drive in Fort Worth Texas, on this evening.
Hopefully, Sardines will try to get back to their old standards of treating the customer as a guest and remembering that the staff is the overhead to help the customer’s visit as enjoyable as possible.
Sardines Ristorante Italian , 509 University Drive in Fort Worth Texas, used to be a really enjoyable place. Tonight?... not so much.