Cowtown Diner’s wait staff got blasted in this Dallas Morning News restaurant review.
Reviewer Leslie Brenner liked the downtown Fort Worth restaurant’s decadent comfort food. “I swooned over a bacon-wrapped, tempura-battered, deep-fried deviled egg,” she wrote.
But Brenner described the service as “stunningly bad.”.
Result: the newspaper gave one star out of a possible five.
One-star restaurants don’t stay in business long.
But you’ve got to wonder if the wait staff was incompetent or just avoiding a pushy diner. Consider this sentence from Brenner, who wanted to share a salad with her companions but got upset because special flatware wasn’t provided: “We had nothing to toss or serve [the salads] with, and now the server was AWOL. We had already used our forks for the eggs, so that was out.”
What the…?!
Forks were available at Brenner’s table but the utensils had been in contact with deviled eggs – the same eggs she swooned over – and thus she required fresh spoons to split a salad.
Cough-Diva!-Cough.
Sounds a bit beeyotchy to me.
Fort Worth Weekly reviewer Laura Barker James described Cowtown Diner’s service as “absolutely flawless.”
Fort Worth Star-Telegram also gave the restaurant a nice review.
On the other hand, Star-Telegram food critic Bud Kennedy described service as “inept” on his Facebook page. (Bud, are you a diva too?)
Anybody out there have any opinions about Cowtown Diner’s wait staff?
I’m no diva, but the service was absolutely appalling on a recent visit. My wife and I were practically the only people in there and we were still ignored. Water refills? Nada. Waiter had no knowledge of the menu items. We had to repeat orders several times. Food came out of sequence. The food was OK, not great. Our waiter was parked at the bar, back to us, watching the TV. The manager wandered around ignoring it all. We vowed never to return and we always give new places a couple of chances. FW has many choices now at this price point (sadly few at late night) and this lousy management will be it’s death knell….too bad.
I drove all the way from Dallas to visit Cowtown Diner to see if all the positive buzz and hype (pre-Leslie Brenner review) was true. I had a wonderful experience. The deviled eggs, although sounding a bit scary, were marvelous and a must-try. The chicken fried chicken was so good that I don’t want to order it at any other restaurant, because odds are that it will be disappointing in comparison. And the service was fine. I wouldn’t say it say it was five-star, but for a more casual atmosphere, service was attentive and friendly. I had utensils to eat. Beverages for drinking. Answers to my questions (my questions were probably not food critic material. “Where’s the restroom? What do you recommend? What’s the most popular dish?”). My advice — you be the judge — experience it and make your own decision.
By and large, restaurant critics have little understanding of the food or service industry about which they’re writing. Leslie Brenner is one in a long line of critics who flippantly offer their unqualified opinions with little regard to the blood, sweat, tears and money that go into starting and running an independent restaurant.
I’m not sticking up for Cowtown Diner – I haven’t been there so I have no idea how it is – but I am sticking up for restaurants that unfortunately can succeed or fail based off one person’s only visit condensed into a few hundred words.
In Leslie Brenner’s defense, she did go back a second time — and received even worse service. At least she gave the restaurant two attempts to meet her exacting standards.
On the other hand, she sounded like a diva when she couldn’t get a special spoon for her salad during the first visit, and so maybe she went the second time with a chip on her shoulder.
Reviewers are supposed to work for us, Joe and Jane Q. Public, letting us know the best places to eat in an unbiased and informative way.
I wrote occasional restaurant reviews at the Star-Telegram in the 1990s, which was a joke because at the time I was subsisting almost solely on TV dinners, microwave burritos, and Jack In The Box tacos. There wasn’t a plate of food at any restaurant in the country that wouldn’t have been an improvement over my normal diet.
Naturally, not once did I ever write a bad review. So, who’s the better reviewer?
I might say it was Brenner, because at least she has basic standards.
However, as Superman’s dear ol’ dad explained to him — with power comes responsibility.