Ate at Brick & Fire tonight

[surina777]

Didn't want this to get mixed up in the restaurant & bars thread so I thought I'd make a new post.

Here's my story

A group of originally 18 grew to about 25 went to Brick & Fire Pizza tonight. If you aren't aware Brick & Fire is located where Absinthe use to be, near the formerly known club as Dolce (I learned tonight, that the place shut down...) off of Church St.

So they had our table ready, the hostess out front seemed very excited to see our group. I made reservations on restaurant.com for 8:15pm, so I was suprised that actually worked. There was maybe 2 other tables of 4 in the restaurant, but besides that we were "it." We all got seated, we were given 2 servers for our group. One server started from one side of the table to start getting our drink orders, and the other server started from the other side...well somehow along the way they forgot to communicate and skipped at least one persons drink order. He finally orders than it probably took a good 10 minutes before the drinks came out. I think a few waters and soda's came out, then gradually anyone who ordered alcohol were probably served in the next 10 minutes. 2 mojitos were ordered....it took probably 30 minutes before those 2 got their mojitos, not mention they were served in a martini glass with some sort of sausage and peppers (one of the customers who ordered a mojito was a vegetarian!!! ugh) so not only did it take 30 minutes but his drink came with meat! So we have probably been there a good 30+ minutes, one side of the table has ordered their food and the other side was just getting orders in ... we finally all get our food orders in. The servers are trying to keep up with refills and such. The food is starting to come out and it was actually pretty good, awesome right?! They might actually redeem themselves on their poor service so far. Well when my food came out, the pizza was cold, when all those around me got pizza theres appeared to be steaming hot, so our pizza was sent back. The vegetarian didn't even get his pizza! His order got lost, now don't get me wrong, it is understandable to get an order lost when you have a full restaurant and have to deal with a group of 25 people, but we were the only 25 people in the restaurant! So the server is going around trying to recall what everyone got to eat so he can split our checks. He goes and asks the guy who has not even eaten yet what he had to order, not once, but came back again and re-asked him what he had, so he could get his bill, not even realizing he had not even eaten yet. Anyways back to the check splitting, I can also understand it is difficult to split a check for a huge party like us, but it shouldn't be THAT dificult when we are the only 25 people in your restaurant. We are probably waiting around for a good 30 minutes for our checks, some get theres, some don't some are waiting for there credit cards to be processed. Everyone is finally ready to get out of there and continue on with our evening elsewhere. So those who still need to pay, get up and head towards the server where he is figuring out our checks with the manager. Somehow the server mixes up the bills and credit cards and piles the credit cards up and puts them on the counter...everyone finds there credit card and we stand in line to pay. As far as the staff, they seemed like they were pretty new to handling a group our size or maybe even serving...the manager apologized as much as he could, but didn't offer any reason for us to return.

Pretty frustrating when you have a group our size at a new restaurant and can't get close to if not exceeding 100% service, when you are trying to find customers who will spread good words about your place of business. Our group eats out at least twice a week and we typically have 10 - 25 people in our group. We have eaten at more than plenty of places that have been able to handle a group our size with out a hitch and be in a busy restaurant environment. For their sake, I hope they have a busy lunch time, b/c it does appear that they are not getting a lot of business. Ceviche across the street seemed packed and super busy!

I sure hope they pull their act together and are able to stick around so that once everything is back in business in that church st. area, so they can actually be a good restaurant.

[jack]

How was the food?

[frankieb96]

How was the food?

[jack]

Good to know. I was going to go there Saturday night but we decided against from the non positive reviews that I have heard from people that have eaten there. With those prices, the food has to be darn good.