Gator's Dockside Highland City — Restaurant in Bartow

Not that Gator’s has ever been fine dining, but it was at least an average sport bar.

However, if today’s example is any indication of how the needle is moving, it’s not good for diners.

It wasn’t busy at all, when we entered, maybe 25-30 people. Waited about 8-10 minutes for someone to take our drink order, came back with the drink and we ordered our meal. Spaghetti w/ meatballs and a Seabreeze salad.

Then the agonizing wait.

It took almost 40 minutes before we got our food, as we waited the place started filling up. My spaghetti was a block of spaghetti with a little sauce, but it did have 6 bland meatballs, like the frozen food section at the grocery, but not the included garlic bread. The salad was good, according to my wife. The bread was coming, but I already ate some of the spaghetti and all of the meatballs, because I hadn’t eaten today.

The main issue I had, was the lack of wait staff and the expediency of the line staff. I also saw no busser to clear tables, so wait staff had that too. They all looked stressed.

I’ve been to Gator’s many times over the years, and each time I’m hoping they found a manager that truly knows how to ‘run’ a restaurant.

Having the wait staff apologizing at every table is not what you want to see.

Too bad, I live nearby, but find more and more we tend to avoid Gator’s.

Still, I...

Our waiter was the most inattentive waiter I have had in a long time. Ordered drinks and when they came we recieved no straws. Took 10 minutes almost to get straws. Ordered gator bites as an appetizer and they were so tough, I could tell they had been quickly thawed out for our order. As soon as you poked them with a fork, ALL the batter fell off immediately. My friend ordered the Turkey burger, when brought out, the white American cheese that she substituted for the blue cheese spread was no where to be found. Finally when an employee walked by we told him that the cheese she ordered was not on the turkey burger and we showed him. He quickly walked away and then brought back 3 slices of cold white American cheese on a side plate.I wanted to say, is this really how you were trained to resolve mistakes like this? Is this how you should eat a cheese burger? The bacon she added to the turkey burger came out practically half cooked as well. No one was paying attention to anything in that place. The Scooter sauce was the best thing we had for the wings that night. Ridiculous! The service was sub par and the hour we were there, never saw a manager at all. Kicker was that now I know why there was only 4 or 5 tables occupied in...

We were looking for a place to do weekly trivia as a group. Last week, we did Mellow Mushroom and it was pretty fun for the whole group. This week, we tried Gator's and it was just ok. We found that they had trivia via their website. And, coincidentally, they also offered 75€ wings on Wednesdays- according to their website. Everyone planned on getting a ton of wings to share but we decided to try other dishes as well since we had never been to this location. Refills were an issue- ok it was busy. We had a decent enough time, we took 2nd in trivia- and then the bill came. They charged us regular price for the wings. Ok. Nbd, we will get it fixed. The waitress acted like we were taking money out of her pocket. She stated "oh the website is wrong." Eventually, she sent the manager over and the manager was unbelievably rude. She also acted like we were robbing them of their life's savings rather than just a few dollars. She had me walk her through how I found it on the website. I did. She eventually took it off but made sure we knew she wasn't happy about it. That's ok. Other places have trivia and the food wasn't so amazing that we couldn't get the same bar grub somewhere else. We gave the gift card we won in trivia to...