I don’t normally feel the need to review a chain, but this was too epic to turn down.

After attending the Baltimore auto show, my friends Sandy, Josh, Stephen and I were hungry for a later afternoon lunch.  We decided to pick a place that was on the way back to our parking garage.  We ended up at the Power Plant at the Inner Harbor and had narrowed it down to either Dick’s Last Resort or Houlihan’s.  For those of you not familiar, Dick’s intentionally provides bad service and insults the customers as a gimmick, Houlihan’s unintentionally does the same thing.

We got to the restaurant around 2:30 in the afternoon, and it understandably wasn’t that busy at the time.  We were seated and handed our menus.  Mine was dirty and the pages were literally falling out.  Stephen’s menu had a completely different lunch selection than everyone else.  Not wanting to bother the 5 waitresses standing around talking and not helping us, we just assumed his was wrong.

After about 10 minutes of waiting, someone came over and asked if we had a waitress.  After we informed her we didn’t, she said she could get us something to drink. Another member of the wait staff awkwardly came over, didn’t say anything and placed 4 paper coasters on the table and then left.  The waitress that took our drink order returned with our drinks and said our actual waitress would be right over.

Finally, about 15 minutes after being originally seated, we got to meet our waitress.  She asked if we had any questions (we refrained from making a sarcastic question) and she took our order.  This process went more or less smoothly, until Sandy threw the waitress with a curve-ball by asking what the vegtable  of the day was.  We were told and I quote “It’s carrots and broccoli, but it’s carrots then broccoli, not carrots and broccoli.” Confused by this statement, we eventually came to find it was carrots ==OR== broccoli. 

You know when you are in a restaurant and you can smell some amazing smoked bacon scent coming from the kitchen?  The smell at Houlihan’s is similar… except, instead of smoked bacon it was cigarette smoke, and instead of the kitchen the smell was coming from the side door that the wait staff stands at and continually opens to take their smoke breaks.

The wait for the food wasn’t that long.  When it came, we quickly learned based on the amount of fries on our plate which of us had the cutest smile, me.  Josh and Stephen got a sparse amount of fries, while I seemed to have at least twice as many.  My burger was ok, I ordered it medium with bacon, and got it well overdone with some soggy bacon tasting meat on top.  Josh ordered his rare and got it cooked to about medium. 

After getting the check, I placed my credit card down and went to the bathroom. I figured that by the time we got back I could sign and end this disaster of an eating experience.  I was wrong, it took a good 3 to 5 minutes AFTER I got back before someone came to get our credit card.  That person wasn’t our waitress who was nowhere to be found.

Overall, not worth going back to.  Next time we want sub par service I think we’ll just try Dick’s.

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