After our Mall excursion, we decided to dine out this evening opting for the new kid of the block – Kicky’s on Route 34 in Aberdeen. I’m going to be generous and say overall it was an okay experience. It certainly wasn’t my worst experience dining out, but not my best either.
The decor is quite sleek and interesting – especially the banquets and the 10-person glass enclosed table. The food is actually pretty good, too. The only area that needs improvement is service. While there appeared to be sufficient servers, it seemed some signals were crossed.
Our server was courteous, I’ll definitely give her that. There seemed to be some confusion with our water, though – you see we ordered a bottle of sparkling water. Almost immediately after she scurried away from our table – the water guy comes to fill our glasses with regular water. We didn’t stop him thinking that once our server came back with the bottled water we would simply say we needed other glasses for the sparkling water. She did notice our water-filled glasses and said, “I’ll be right back with glasses for your bottled water.”
When she came back, she went right to serving the other table beside us. That’s fine, I thought. When she’s done there she’ll go get the other glasses. Nope. She did come over to our table to take our order and rushed away without mentioning anything about the other glasses. OK, whatever. No biggie really. We chugged the regular water and replaced with the sparkling water.
Our appetizers did not come together, though. That’s a bit of a dining out pet peeve of mine. I think most courses – especially appetizers – should be served at the same time and definitely when it’s only a party of 2. I don’t think one person should start eating before another. Especially in a “nice” restaurant, but I digress. ;)
Furthermore, it was served by one of the hostesses. So when our server came back, she apologized for not bringing extra glasses for the sparkling water and not serving the appetizers together — but blamed other people for it. Service is a team effort, I realize, however blaming it on other people just made *her* look bad. She should have simply apologized and left it at that.
Anyways, all that aside, like I said it was okay. Not great, but not horribly bad either. I think for what we paid for it should have been a great experience, though. I know they are new and are probably still working out the kinks, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt this time. We still tipped our server accordingly. But I’m not sure we’ll be back any time soon.
Exit 117A 