An Evening in the Twin Cities: TGIFriday's, Rosedale

Friday, August 01, 2008

TGIFriday's, Rosedale

Her perspective: B-

We decided to go to Friday's because we had a coupon for a free appetizer from a screw-up at our last visit to the Maplewood location.

This visit started out really well. We arrived after the lunch rush. The hosts were right on top of opening the door, being friendly and making us feel welcome. However, we waited quite a while before we were greeted at the table. Our server was friendly - whenever he was at our table, but that wasn't much.

We ordered Fried Mac & Cheese for an appetizer and gave him our coupon. He took the coupon and we received our appetizer several minutes later. I noticed that it looked different than when I had worked at Friday's and when we started eating, we noticed that they were passably warm on the outside, but room temperature to cold in the middle.

I ordered the Jack Daniel's pork sandwich and William ordered the Jack Daniel's Flat Iron Steak, medium. My sandwich was what I expected - no more, no less - and pretty tasty. The best part, was that William's steak was cooked perfectly. I don't remember the last time that has happened in all the restaurants we have gone to in the last few months. When the food arrived, the server asked William to cut into his steak to make sure it was cooked properly (a Friday's service standard). William took his steak knife and stabbed the steak with it so that the knife stayed up when he removed his hand from the knife. The server commented that this was a different way than he'd seen to check the temperature of a steak. He never checked back on how everything was as we were eating and we didn't see him again for a long time.

After having empty plates for quite a while, the server finally came back and took William's credit card to run through. When he came back, I noticed that he had not taken the appetizer off the bill. The server claimed that he could not redo the credit card, but I know that's not true. I'm not sure if he didn't know that the system could do that or if he was just lying to us. William asked him to give us our coupon back. We'll have to go back if we want to use it. Perhaps we need to try yet another location.

Overall, we were disappointed, but the saving grace was that perfectly cooked steak.

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Maryanne was in the restaurant industry for 14 years, including one year as a manager for Chili's Grill and Bar. She has experience in fast food, family chain restaurants (with and without alcohol) and fine dining. She has a Hospitality and Tourism Management degree which gives her an understanding of the service industry including travel, hotel, gaming, food and beverage, and entertainment. She is also an actress with some years experience doing short and feature films, online episodic shows, student films, film projects and contests which include both paid and voluntary roles.

William has none of that experience, but instead has experience eating with and entertaining groups of different sizes in a variety of venues in different areas of the Country. That and a knowledge of how things 'should' work in the entertainment and service worlds. He forms his own opinions from that mix of knowledge using a good dose of common sense and a perception of what he feels people expect from dining out at various venues, seeing movies and such.

Our rating system is just a guide, and no rating system is 100% perfect. We are just married couples, friends and relatives that enjoy movies, eating out and other entertainment in the Twin Cities area, and generally we find that people agree with our assessments of different venues, so we offer this bit of common-man insight to everyone. We feel that we're all pretty average people, and we expect what we think any average person would when we spend money to go places and do things, and we have the same reactions when things go right or wrong as most anyone else would. We offer this blog and our experiences to people so they can know or formulate a better opinion as to whether they might want to spend their money or not at these same places or for the same things.

We know that lots of people don't follow reviews and critics and such because they are paid to do what they do, and they generally spend a lot of time qualifying what they say so that you could make the review mean more than it really does. We are all straight-forward and upfront people, and we're not paid, reimbursed or in some other way compensated for these reviews. Maybe it's just us, but we think that lends us more credibility since we're just doing it because we can and we like to, not because we get paid for doing it.

That said, you have to keep in mind that we aren't pro's or anything, so you'll get a no-nonsense perspective from us. We may seem harsh at times, but you need to remember that in some cases we'd spend a lot of money just to come away with a poor review. It hurts having to spend money on something and have nothing good to show for it, and we feel that other people would have the same reaction we would in cases like that, and our reviews reflect that fact. Along that same line, we like spending a little money and getting more value from it. Our reviews and descriptions should also show that, and that's what we're trying to get across to other people as well.

Again, we aren't compensated for this in any fashion, we just do it because we can, we want to, and to maybe help some other people out in the process.

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Friday, August 01, 2008

TGIFriday's, Rosedale

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