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From: [an eater]
Date: Friday, November 14, 2008
To: eater complaints dept.
Subject: Ivo & Lulu Hell
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My friends and I had one of the worst restaurant experiences last Saturday night in the name of BYOB. Resy was at 9:30 at Ivo & Lulu but we weren't seated until 10:30. Resys clearly are meaningless because the host/server never asked for the party's name. The place was madness. Every staff member was rattled and apathetic, it was loud in both dining rooms and there were a few tables who were lingering long after their meals. Had we not brought two bottles of wine with us, we would've been gone within the first couple of minutes.
During that hour-long wait, we witnessed a server eating the last pheasant pate appetizer at the bar, two servers were loudly arguing with each other in French in plain view while we tried to get their attention for any kind of service, there were zero wine glasses for the first half hour and we couldn't get our wine shocked. I get it. It's a Saturday night. But we really weren't asking for anything beyond the standard.
The most irritating part was the utter lack of communication from the staff and we found them rude and incompetent. After asking several times to get our bottles open, we uncorked and poured the wine ourselves into champagne glasses, had to track down the host several times to get some sort of status on the wait and we were made to feel like a huge inconvenience by the staff the entire time. It really set a foul tone for the entire night. After an hour of waiting, a staff asked a lingering table of four to relocate to the bar to finish their last bottle.For more stories from Eater, go to eater.com.
