Phillips Old Colony House

Review
I want to let you know that I was very disappointed by my experience at a First Holy Communion event yesterday at Phillip's Old Colony House. The servers in the room were consistently surly, annoyed and rude. We had two special dietary requests at my table: 1 gluten free and 1 vegetarian. I had RSVPed in advance that I would need to have a gluten free meal for my 13 year old daughter (it is for health reasons (celiac disease) and a vegetarian meal for me. I noted that on my RSVP to my host, she informed your catering folks well in advance, she reminded the person in charge of the room at 11:30 am and I also reminded my server at 12:30 pm. Both are really pretty simple requests. No croutons on the salad and no gravy on the steak to make the meal gluten free and vegetarian is pretty self-explanatory! Well, my daughter's salad arrived with croutons and the steak arrived with gravy. No problem, right? This should be a pretty easy thing for a food service provider in the customer service business to fix, one would expect. No - unfortunately - it was communicated to me with a series of sighs, hisses, shrugs and every possible means of non-verbal communication that this was indeed a major deal. As we waited and waited and waited and the rest of the room received and finished their meals, we waited some more. Eventually I was told "this will take a while" - but not with a tone of apology or "we can fix this" - but rather with a surly and annoyed tone. My daughter waited at least 45 minutes for her meal to eventually arrive. Everyone else at the table had long since finished their meal. Two other people at my table waited extraordinarily long periods of time for the meals (chicken) and I waited a half an hour for my (extremely disappointing) vegetarian plate of plain boiled pasta and a few boiled vegetables - it had no sauce, no cheese - and no taste of any kind! Our extended family has held quite a few, very large parties at your site in the past but I am afraid yesterday's experience makes me feel very unwilling to use or recommend Phillip's Old Colony House ever again. So, they may have lost our business for good. But, in the event you have guests with special dietary needs in the future (4% of Americans are vegetarian and 1% have celiac disease) - this function hall really needs to gain the skills of handling special dietary requirements.
Posted by Mary: May. May 3rd, 2010 at 11:40 AM