My friends and I had a comedically terrible dining experience at MIDA South end on Saturday night March 16, 2024. If this evening was written as a scene in a book, I would have read it and thought “Wow, that's not very realistic, there is no way it could have been that bad.” And yet, it was.

The reservation was for my friend Alice’s birthday. She had booked at 4 pm for 8 people but forgot to account for herself so there were actually 9 of us. I arrived at 4:20 and took the eighth seat. My friends told me that they already asked to add an additional chair but were told that adding a ninth chair to the table was a fire hazard. That's fine. Our ninth friend arrived at 4:25 and while we were devising a complicated seating rotation where one person would have to sit at the bar for fifteen minutes at a time, a very nice gentleman sitting alone at a two-top adjacent to our table offered up the seat across from him. One person from our group took him up on it.

We ordered drinks at 4:35 and got them at least 10 minutes later. No less than 20 minutes after that, someone took our entree orders, which weren’t delivered until after 5:30 pm. I remember the timing, because one person from our party had to leave at 5:30 to make it to something else. She had to leave without eating. After she left, a spot was open for our friend that had spent the previous hour sitting with a (very gracious) stranger.

Our friend told us that while he was sitting with the stranger, a female member of staff approached and asked him if he had asked to sit there, in front of the man who had offered the seat.

My friend was taken aback by the implication that he had inserted himself at this man's table. The stranger chirped up to say that he had invited him. By 5:20ish the man had actually finished with his meal and left, leaving my friend alone at the two-top for less than 10 minutes when another member of staff came by to inform him that he would need to vacate that two-top within fifteen minutes for an upcoming reservation. Mind you, our friend had already ordered a drink and an entree, he wasn't loitering.

I ordered the Arctic Chard. I remember eating it and thinking “This doesn’t taste very good,” but I was starving and wasn’t about to add anymore negativity to this experience, so I ate it and kept my mouth shut.

At 6, our waiter took our dessert orders, which almost everyone wanted. Dessert was the most important part of the meal because this is a birthday dinner, so we were going to sing happy birthday to Alice. At 6:15 another member of staff came over and asked if we would be willing to take our dessert to-go because they had another reservation coming in a few minutes that would need the table.

What?

At this point most of us canceled our dessert orders and were visibly annoyed. Around this time, my stomach started turning.

Our server was apologetic, and took one dessert and the meal that my friend who left early never got to eat, off the check.

Nevertheless, we were fed up and started to walk out to the sidewalk when I realized that I was about to be ill. I went back inside the restaurant bathroom where I proceeded to violently vomit up the cursed arctic chard I had choked down 30 minutes prior. I informed the hostess on my way back out that the Arctic Chard was spoiled.

We got in an Uber, where I rode with my head hanging out of the window. Inevitably, I did spew fishy-puke all over the side of this Uber’s Range Rover. Luckily, the Uber driver had better customer service skills than whoever is managing South End MIDA and offered me a bottle of water.

I would like it noted that I had not had any alcohol that day. I had ordered a diet coke. We were a quiet group of grad students in our mid-twenties that dressed up for a 4 pm dinner reservation to celebrate a birthday. I honestly doubt that if we had been a bunch of Beacon Hill boomers, we would have received such second-class citizen treatment.

Meanwhile I had to cancel my St.Patricks day plans because I can’t keep down so much as a saltine cracker.