Hearsay Arlington — Restaurant in Arlington

My cousin and I met here tonight, May 17, to meet up for dinner and catch up. I made reservations for 7pm. Red flag the manger walked around spoke to other patrons yet said nothing to me nor my guest when he arrived, I sat at the bar and was served by Zack and then Jaleel. Jaleel and a male waiter talked about how they were finally paid after waiting for a while but both were ready to work tonight. My cousin arrives, we had a few drinks at the bar and I was seated while my cousin spoke w/ Jaleel. He come to the table and informed he put his card on tab and paid for the drinks we had. The waitress comes up and asked if we had been served? She was the only one in the area serving the two other booths. So we quickly ordered, ate our over cooked salmon and dried out duck. I asked for a to go box, For $36 it’ll get ate, she offered to box it up. I received my to go, which I ate 1 quarter of the duck I received and barely touched the dressing, so I had half of my order + a bit of my cousin blackened salmon. She came back with someone else’s food, which was fried food and half a teaspoon of rice. I advised her this isn’t my plate. She went back to check on where the remaining of my order was so we went back to the bar, I felt like either they threw it away or she kept it. She come up and advised someone ate my leftovers 🙄. Ma’am I barely ate my food, and she brushed it off saying they make me sick. Who is they? You were suppose to handle it, she said she would return but didn’t. We ordered another round and was ready to leave. I advised Jaleel I was paying for this round. He kept saying he was coming yet we waited I decided to check out the smoke area and he caught me coming back in and said I could pay since he was walking back in. He charged me for the entire bill $100 worth of drinks. I advised that it was paid for and I was paying for 2 drinks he stated that a card was on file but nothing paid. No biggie, paid and left. Asked my cousin about it as we waited for our cars, he showed me he had already paid for the drinks from his account. STAY AWAY! They take your leftovers and double charge for drinks. This place is CROOKED and FULL of scammers. Since they don’t pay their employees an refund isn’t an option nor receiving dried out food since they keep your leftovers. It’s a joke and sad to see how this place has gone down. NEVER Again! Trash TrashTrash. All of the double will mean nothing since they’re barely paying the staff, no wonder they’re eating...

I want to love Hearsay. We are Arlington locals and love Mercury Chophouse and loved that another higher end restaurant was opening that also included music. First - the atmosphere and vibe is fabulous. The details in the entire restaurant are above par. However things go down from there. The restaurant is meant to be a higher end, more expensive experience which is fine if they can deliver. The live band was amazing! However they start at 730 and it is VERY loud while dining. My personal opinion is to have music playing or a single pianist and singer play till 9 and then have a band come on. We were screaming to each other during dinner. The Food: Appetizers we ordered: pork belly, Brussel sprouts and the king crab. These were all delicious but the crab I'd very sloppy for a fine dining restaurant. There were 4 of us and they gave us 1 cracker utensil and no wet napkins. Again a personal opinion but for what they are trying to sell the should have a crab served pre cracked and proper cleaning materials for guests. Soups & Salads: we got the tomato soup which was good and huge - 4 of us split it. We told them we were sharing and they only brought one spoon so we had to ask for that. We also split a wedge salad and Cesar. The wedge was okay but the Cesar was awful! Soggy croutons and very over dresses. Also we told them we were splitting the salads and most restaurant would separate them prior to serving. Dinner: trout, scallops, ribeye. The scallops were small but very good. The trout was okay, needed lemon and seasoning. The steak was okay as well, nothing too exciting. Overall the food was "okay". We got two bottles of wine which were good and fairly priced. The biggest issues are that they just don't seem to care. There was 1 waitress for the entire lounge and she did great but obviously couldn't appropriately take care of everyone. Meanwhile there are managers, many bartender and other wait staff just standing around. We had to go to the bar to get our second round of drinks and ask for some other items. I truly want this restaurant to work but they need to tighten up their ship. There weren't many patrons dining so there was zero excuse for us to wait or ask for anything. Everything seemed like chaos and like no one really knew what was going on. I don't think I'd go back go dine but I would go back to sit at the bar and enjoy the music from a more tolerable...

We Dined here on 5/12/2023.

We had a very interesting experience. We typically look up reviews, and this time round we did and ignored all the “red flags”. Only for us to experience everything else that people complained about.

Some of the Key takeaways:

They have Valet, not complementary though. You will have to pay $20. They ask if you want to pay before or after. I mean why would I want to pay for service I haven’t received yet?

Second, we encountered Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Katie. They gave us the warmest welcome and sat us right away. Even gave us options to choose where we wanted to sit at.

When it got to the food, they only brought us One Bread. I mean why would you bring one bread for a table of 7?

Then when we got to put in our food orders, we literally waited 2 hours for the food. Which was very strange b/c they were not even busy. We even asked our server if they were busy which might have caused the delay in the kitchen, and she said No.

Sadly, we waited for 2 whole hours for our food to come out only to be HUGELY disappointed because our food wasn’t even HOT. To make matters worse, one person in our party did not even get their food. They had to send a couple of people back to the kitchen to check on the missing food.

One of us even ordered Medium rare lamb chop, and it was literally RAW! We had to send that back as well together with the cold foods.

The manager finally brought out the missing food, dropped it on the table, asked if we were ok and just stormed off. No compassion or apologetic whatsoever.

Once we were done dining, we asked to talk to the manager AGAIN, he came by our table, and he was very dismissive. He offered to take a % off our tab even before were done voicing our concerns. Which was very dismissive. Totally made us feel like we were just there to get some free meal. We even mentioned to him that we read through the reviews before we went there, and he acknowledged that they are aware of the customers’ complaints. The saddest part is they are not willing to make the necessary changes. Eventually, he took 25% off our tab which was a kind gesture, but he totally missed the point.

The place is soo beautiful with perfect Ambience, but they literally must work on getting better staff that are...