Frankie & Bennies' Disaster

I mentioned recently that we were going for a meal at Frankie & Bennies.

Prophetically it was at the end of a post entitled Trials and Tribulations. We've been to Blackpool's Frankie & Bennies so many times and always had a great time but last night was unfortunately not one of them.

We went with David and Jeannie as a foursome and were told we'd have to wait 30 to 40 minutes for a table which wasn't great but we could put up with that. In the end though it was 1 hour and 20 minutes and despite asking where we were in the queue the chap on the door was obviously putting other people in first.

The manager said this would be because of bookings. I did point out that the whole point about making a booking would be so the restaurant was expecting people and could therefore surely have told us there were so many people before us in the queue and so many bookings to come in?

I think the doorman simply either hadn't a bloody clue (and I'd have to have similar thoughts about the manager) or he hadn't the courage to tell people a realistic waiting time. Had we been told it would be over an hour we would have gone somewhere else. What he did was to put both the kitchen staff and the waiting staff under so much pressure that even the meals were not as good as they should have been.

Meat ordered medium was well done and a tomato was crisped on one side and left raw on the other - classic symptoms of a chef too busy to cope. The fact that the tomato was green though wasn't good...

Once we were seated it took another 40 minutes for the starters to arrive. Now given that the restaurant is opposite the Odeon cinema and used by lots of people wanting to go onto to watch a film, you can imagine that people at just about every table were getting agitated. Some swore a lot more than we did!

Luckily we weren't going to the cinema but had we been we would have had to miss either the film or a meal. Not good!

Anyway, I'm going to look for something good to put on this blog - I'm sounding more and more like a grumpy old man...