Grille 44 — Restaurant in Bear Lake Township

Yikes. I had to wait a few days to post this and then after reading the responses from the restaurant to other low ratings, I knew I had to.

Let me start off by saying I know and understand that times are tough and staffing can be an issue. But, I have only had worse service one time in my life and that server literally stuck their finger in my food. I bring that incident up because it is the ONLY time I've had worse service than I had here the other day.

I have never felt like such a burden and so unwelcome. Our server couldn't care less if we were happy or not and couldn't make us feel more unwanted. She never introduced herself, so I didn't catch her name. We waited with empty glasses most of the time we were there. We pushed our dirty plates, with most of our cold food left on them to the end of the table. They sat there the entire rest of our visit without the server ever asking if everything tasted right. It didn't.

When she disappeared we were left to ask a different server to get the manager. We saw that server come out from the back but no manager. I can only assume they didn't want to talk to us. We waited about 15 minutes for the manager to come out but they never did.

We won't be back. It was not worth our time or money and I doubt it'd be worth yours either.

EDIT Since the restaurant responded "Nice Try" I thought I'd include a screenshot of my mobile banking app to prove...

We'd heard good things about Grille 44. On a positive note, the atmosphere is great and it's very clean. Other than that, we were pretty disappointed. The service was so slow we actually counted the number of customers in the restaurant, which was 18 at the time we had dinner. There were FIVE waitresses working plus a bartender, so basically three people per staff member. We each got a drink and finished it before our appetizer went out. Like normal people, we put our empty glasses on the outside of the table. When our dinner came out, she didn't take the empty glasses or fill them up. She never check on us during dinner, even when we stopped eating and were trying to get her attention while she was right next to us. My husband eventually walked up to the bar and paid separate for our second drinks. We finished those and dinner and had another 15 minutes before she even came to our table to "check in". We've both been waitstaff and understand how service can be slow on a busy night, but that wasn't the case today. No one wants empty drinks and crappy service and that's what we got. Maybe others will have...

Good food, but local servers who are lacking decent service. I’ve been coming to this location since they were an ice cream shop in the 90s. This was my experience:

Day 1: Went inside to pickup a pizza order. I had to ask 4 different servers to check on my order. All seemed annoyed that I even asked. After ten minutes of waiting... they finally remembered they put it in the drive through pickup area. They then went on to tell me I should have gone through the drive though for pickup... shouldn’t be a big deal that I went in to ask about it. (Pizza was good quality)

Day 2: Ordered fish for pickup, and went to the drive through... it took 5 minutes before someone actually came to the drive through window. I had to crack it open and yell for someone inside to help me. Not impressed and once again they acted like they were too good to help. (Fish was...