Blue Room

One more ML HH in the bag as another approaches: this was at Blue Room, right at the mouth of the Queensboro Bridge.  The earlycomers ordered dinner: a buffalo chicken wrap sandwich with onion rings (onion rings a little greasy, as expected). 

and a BBQ chicken sandwich, which seemed to be well received.  Those waffle fries look good, anyway. 

I ordered the smothered waffle fries, not realizing just how smothered they’d arrive…

That’s how smothered.  You can’t even see my fries!  In all fairness, though, it was pretty tasty, though it did get soggy pretty quickly just from the massive amount of toppings covering it.  Liquid cheese! 

I forget who ordered waffle fries with gravy, but the waffle fries were legit – crispy and salty goodness. 

And of course we ordered wings, we’re in a bar that boasts an attached Atomic Wings!  The above must’ve been the spicy order…

while BBQ was ordered to accomodate me, the person who can’t eat very spicy things.  And the wings were good, meaty, saucy, properly cooked, yummy. 

Ordinary lushes might recognize that our bill, for a group of 8-10 (we expanded and contracted a few times), is pretty low.  However, it would have been much higher had the management not been such douchebags.  Normally, I’d let this go and just not post this – mostly because it’s a happy hour and I’m not here to talk about drinking (too much), but the service really pissed me off enough that I have to mention this. 

The first thing was our waitress, who was nice enough but completely boneheaded.  Blue Room has a policy of not allowing groups to have more than 2 credit cards down.  So we decided we’d pay in cash.  It seems normal procedure, except she then insisted that she’d keep a running tab and give us a detailed bill (see: above photo) at the end.  Which honestly makes no sense because at that point, you’re just letting us run a tab but without holding anyone’s credit card to secure it.  Fine. 

Even before that, when two of the early people tried to pay for their dinners and take back their cards, she couldn’t or wouldn’t give us a straight answer about what she was doing or why she couldn’t give us the cards back.  Every question asked returned a total runaround response.  Eventually, we just gave up and accepted what we had received – cards, receipts with the wrong tabs on them that required signatures, and a bit of eyerolling.  Maybe even a bit of stomping feet. 

As the night progressed, the bar remained mostly empty; we were easily the largest group in the bar.  A few times, we would try to go up to the bar to order because our waitress would ignore us, standing at the Atomic Wings counter with her back to the entire bar, only to be admonished quickly by the manager, who stood around glaring at us but didn’t offer to help.  “You have a waitress!” he would gripe, and once, he even said that we should be thankful, some people should be so lucky to be waited on hand and foot.  Hey dude, we just want drinks, and if your waitress – who also was acting as second bartender for a little bit here and there – would pay us some attention, we’d have easily ordered double the number of drinks and maybe more food.  No matter what we did, the manager watched us like a hawk – it isn’t like we whipped out needles and started shooting heroin!  We were literally just sitting around, drinking, talking, and having a good time.  Not causing a ruckus or being too loud (we’re in a bar!) or doing anything wrong.  I didn’t even give the waitress a problem when she told me I couldn’t have “outside drink” in the bar (I’d walked in with a can of diet something that they don’t even serve there; when she told me, I said, “Ok, no problem,” and tried to give it to her to throw away, and she acted like I had three heads.  What do you want me to do with my can?  Walk outside and finish it?  Uh, no.  So you take it and dispose of it since I can’t have it in here!). 

Another point, one of our friends went up to the Atomic Wings counter to order food, and was quickly shot down.  And yet more points?  When our group grew too large for our table, the manager rushed over and instructed us how to rearrange the tables so we could fit everyone, and got really impatient and antsy when we moved too slowly for him.  He glared at us as we shuffled around a little bit and refused to allow us to just let things grow organically.  There’s one thing to be careful and know how your bar should be arranged; it’s another to be a complete dick about it. 

I’m sure my fellow HHers will chime in with whatever else we did wrong to disturb the entropy (ha, I’m using that wrong) in the bar, but this really aggravated me.  All we wanted to do was drink and have a good time, and the manager (and our dippy waitress) seemed hell bent on making that not happen.  I don’t know what their problem was, and hopefully they’re not always like that, but it made for everything to kind of suck hard. 

Yvo says: While the food was absolutely tasty as bar food should be, it wasn’t enough to make me ever even consider trying to overcome or deal with the manager’s quirky little rules about how things should be in the place.  Our waitress steadfastly ignored us, and we weren’t allowed to just get up and get our own drinks.  I understand that might disturb the order of things, but then pay attention to us so we can order our freakin’ drinks.  She literally had her back to us about 90% of the time, and the place was NOT busy enough to warrant this.  Our bill was a hot mess and we wound up just paying it, but who knows if that’s really was what we ordered.  So annoying.  So uncomfortable.  So not cool, dude!!!
highly UNrecommended