November 2, 2008

Buffalo Wild Wings

I went to the newly-opened Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar today to watch the game. My reaction was a big fat "meh." The food was okay. The chipotle sauce was hot but everything else I had was fair at best. Except for the nachos, which were a big soggy mess of gloppy cheese food and about twelve pounds of watery salsa with two sour jalapeno pepper slices on top.

But more importantly, the service was not what I was looking for. Although the place has nearly fifty video screens, forty of them were showing the Chicago-Detroit game. The guy who was in charge of setting up the video screens did not seem to know the difference between regular and HD broadcast and did not know how to get DirecTV tuned in to a particular channel. As a result, for the first ten minutes of the Green Bay game, I got to watch a preliminary AKC dog show and championship bowling. Good fun at 3:00 a.m. when you can't sleep, but not why I went there. So when enough people complained, he simply tuned all of the channels to the first game he could find and announced to the wait staff that the games were fixed for the duration. So then I had to move around to find the only screen in the place that was showing the Green Bay-Tennessee game and in so doing, I fell into the nether gap of not being in anyone's station, with the result that I was left alone for an hour and a half until my original waitress came by and asked if anyone had helped me. She found the right person later, but because he had seen me nursing an iced tea beforehand, he thought someone else was helping me. After that, he was fine.

So -- food that's okay at best, a confused wait staff, and a complete bungle of the whole reason I went there in the first place, which was to watch a football game. It didn't help my mood that the Packers fought an ugly, defensive grind and wound up losing by a field goal in overtime.

I doubt that I'll be back.

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