The Dirdie Birdie — Restaurant in Austin

My overall experience can be described in one word. 'Meh' 🤷🏼‍♂️ Here's why broken down:

-- FOOD & DRINK -- (3/5 stars) The food and drink we're actually pretty good. Me and my wife both got a cocktail and a chicken sandwich. Both were decent. Not mind-blowing. Spicy Boys Fried Chicken wins in a battle hands down if that means anything to you. The waffle fries were fluffy and crispy. Biggest downside here was the $$. $19 for that sandwich and fries was pretty steep. Felt more like a $10-15 meal to us. You can get a very similar meal from Topgolf for $12 - far from the $19 we paid here. The cocktails were more of the same. Decent cocktails, but too expensive for what you got. $13-15 cocktails tasted more like a $9-10 cocktail.

-- ATMOSPHERE -- (4/5 stars) The location is cool! 20s-30s / great gatsby vibes maybe? Felt a little 'cold' though. Would suggest getting a lot more plants to warm it up and make it more cozy.

-- MINI GOLF -- (2/5 stars) I made a reservation for dinner, but the website said that it didn't do reservations for mini golf for 2 people (only reservations for 6+) and said just to tell them when you got there for your dinner res to mention it and they'd put you on the list to play when you were done eating. We still ended up waiting like 10-15 min after we were done with our meal to play (after eating for an hour). Seems like they should have been able to figure that out and coordinate? And also seems like you should prioritize guests who just paid $65-70 for dinner in your "tee times"?

Anyway, once we got on the course (which is quite cool, by the way!), it was a LOT of standing around waiting. The tee times were too close together for starters. I would suggest having a 'ranger' to move people along. One of the holes was a virtual putt putt which was a real slow down for all groups.

The first half of our round, the second half of the course was empty and the second half of our round, the first half of the course was empty. If I were to give someone advice playing there, just jump around to open holes and keep track of what you've played on your scorecard. What should have taken 30 min to complete took us an hour. So 30 min of standing around... For $18/person, it was fun but I wouldn't do it again unless it was say half that price.

-- OVERALL -- (3/5 stars) My overall experience with Dirdie Birdie was it was too expensive for the experience provided and the logistics need to be refined. If the food and drink was 20% cheaper and the mini golf scheduling was better handled, this would be a great date night spot. I even reached out to them after our date via their website with some feedback and never heard back. I'm guessing my experience and suggestions have fallen on deaf ears.

As it stands, I cannot really recommend it. But it has so much potential. Too bad. :/ With a few changes, this could easily go from a 3 star review to a 5...

I wouldn’t go again, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

First when we got there, there was an hour and 20 minute wait. I have never reserved mini golf in advance so I didn’t even think to make a reservation. But okay, we put our name on the list and gave our phone number. After an hour and 20 minutes passed, we went in to check on our status and they claimed they tried to text us, but we never got a message. Thankfully they let us in right away due to the mix-up.

The mini golf is horribly overpriced at $18 for only 12 holes, and 2 of those aren’t real holes (more on that later). The entire mini golf space is rather small, as half the square footage was occupied by the bar and tables that hardly anyone was using.

The holes themselves were poorly designed. The theming was cute and creative but the play experience was difficult. The caddy advised us not to climb on any structures if our ball got stuck, and I thought that seemed an unnecessary addition. But with how horrible the holes were designed, it actually makes sense. One of the most prevalent issues is that most of the tracks have tons of corners and 90 degree angles where your ball gets stuck. I lost count of how many times I had to move my ball before hitting because it was too close to the wall or wedged in a corner. Any other mini golf course has lots of rounded edges and slopes so that if your ball hits a barrier, it gets bounced into the green again. (Any Austinite knows Peter Pan has a great course without these issues.) There were also many opportunities for your ball to bounce all the way out of the play area. It was just bad.

Then, 2 out of 12 holes were not a normal play structure. One was a virtual hole where you hit a sensor pad that displays your stroke on the screen. The other was a kind of Plinko style random chance game where your ball gets shot to the top and dropped down through pegs and diverters to randomly fall in a bowl labeled 1-4. These were different and unique but I feel were sort of space savers as there was not enough space for 12 regular holes, let alone 18. I would have been happier with a few unique/not regular designs like this if there was a total of 18.

Lastly, one of the holes was not functioning as designed and so was not very fun. The design was meant to shoot your ball up a pressurized tube and drop it by the hole. But that tube was closed off, so we had a much harder time getting the ball where it needed to go.

All in all I did not feel the poor design warranted the $18 per person price tag. The theming was cute which is why I added one star, but if you take away the theming the holes were frustrating and hard...

I REALLY hate giving new businesses bad reviews, but this one was a doozy.

We made reservations for golf and dinner, more than a week in advance for my wife's birthday. She was very excited to go.

We arrive right on time and get told to wait at the bar, have a drink, and they will contact us when it was time to golf. 30 minutes go by so I went to the front desk to get a reasonable ETA on getting our turn. The guy looked really confused, seemed like he wasn't 100% sure what his own name was. He looks around several times and eventually decides "Maybe 10 minutes?". We wait another 45 minutes... NOTHING. At this point, it's 15 minutes past our DINNER reservation, we haven't gotten to golf, we've vastly overpayed for too-small drinks (wife did say they tasted good), and we haven't even heard anything about our dinner reservation.

We decide that enough of our precious time has been wasted so we close out the bar tab to leave. The tab still had the golf charges on it ($18/person btw), so I request to have it removed.

The bar lady comes back with the manager who "apologizes" and fixes the receipt. She offers NO conversation. NO explanation for wasting our time. She offers nothing for the massive inconvenience and TERRIBLE experience. Then as my wife is getting more upset, the manager finally decides that something needs to be done so she gives us two coupon cards for golf. They aren't even free rounds. They are f**ing BUY ONE GET ONE FREE GOLF TICKETS. So even if we wanted to come back, we would still have to pay for the golf. But we are smarter than to get our time wasted again.

They are very strict on your side of the reservation (the website mentions if you are too late, you forfeit your reservations) but they don't care about them much on their side. Just because you have a reservation does NOT mean you get to golf. It doesn't mean you get to eat. It does mean you can pay for overpriced drinks while you wait for nothing to happen.

Save your time. Do...