Crystal Restaurant — Restaurant in City of Watertown

Several months ago, I was in Watertown for a few days for calling hours and a funeral. I had this restaurant recommended to me by a family member as a small, quiet, relaxing place with good food. I decided to try it out with my girlfriend, looking to have just a quiet, easy-going meal.

After placing our orders, the first thing that happens is the waitress, a girl probably around 18 years old, brings us a basket of what she called "fresh bread" with a napkin laid over top of it. I open it up to grab a piece of bread, and wouldn't you know it, the "fresh bread" was covered in obvious green mold.

I wait for the waitress to come back to inform here, which took a pretty long time for how few customers there were at the time. The next time she comes back is when she brings us our food. I calmly explained to her that the "fresh bread" is covered in green mold, and that I didn't feel comfortable eating anything else they were going to serve me with such a lax policy on food inspection prior to serving it to customers.

The waitress simply said "oh sorry, I'll go get you more bread" and heads to the kitchen. She comes back with more bread and I explain to her that I'm not eating anything she brings me, and ask to speak to a manager. She then told me there was no manager working at the time (this was about 7:30pm on a Wednesday night) but offered to call a manager in from home, and warned me it would take about 30 minutes for the manager to arrive.

I've never worked in a restaurant so I'm not sure how accurate this could be, part of me thought maybe this is just her attempt at trying to get me to not complain to the manager, and if so, it worked. The last thing I wanted to do was sit there for 30 minutes, staring at food I'm afraid to eat, waiting for a manager to come in to offer me even more free food that clearly wasn't prepared with much care.

So I told the waitress I would just be leaving, and she made no attempt to offer me any sort of compensation or incentive to return. I can't imagine how terrible the rest of the food is when they can't even glance at the moldy bread before they bring it to you. I will be warning the rest of my family and everyone I know in Watertown to avoid...

In short, terribly rude service and zero seasoning or flavor.

We were excited to try this place today for lunch and left not only disappointed in the food but also appalled by the service. We were ignored as we stood there waiting to be seated (per the sign) and all 3 younger servers looked at us directly without acknowledging (the place was NOT busy) until finally the guy casually waved us in the direction of our table. Our server Belle was rude and snippy taking our drink orders and impatiently took our food orders - she was bubbly and attentive to her other 2 tables who arrived and ordered after us but got their food well before us and she made sure they always had drinks. When our food finally arrived, she was annoyed that we asked for salt and threw the packets on the table as she was flouncing away. Salt definitely needed as the meat on both our plates had zero flavor or seasoning. My meal had some grey-green mushy canned peas that were unappetizing - my whole plate looked like it came from a nursing home. The mashed potatoes were good. We were never checked on or brought the bill. I walked up to the register where the other two bored looking servers were chatting and asked if I could pay, they wanted my bill and when I said we were ignored, they shrugged and said Well she’s newer. No niceties or apologies at all for anything, they were both huffy about having to ring us up. Belle did not acknowledge us at all the whole time we were standing at the register, I could see her texting through the window into the kitchen. My husband is willing to go back and try once more for dinner because he hopes this was an off day. The level of rudeness and lack of professionalism has me thinking that won’t be for...

The restaurant is full of old school character, antique wooden booths, mosaic style tile floor, metal ceilings and unique lighting. The restaurant itself is wheelchair accessible but the bathrooms are not. The bathrooms are down a narrow flight of stairs, and the bathroom stalls are tiny. Friendly waitresses, and the service was fair. The food however....left much to be desired. If you’re looking for plain, cheap, good enough, or bland food... you have come to the right place. I don’t remember the food being this horrible here, but maybe with covid there was a decline in quality. We ordered French onion soup and soup de jour which was a tomato pasta soup. Both soups were salty and tasted like Campbell’s. For our main lunch we ordered a Reuben and an opened face turkey sandwich with gravy and French fries. The turkey was almost inedible. It tasted bad, and bland, no taste but also disgusting. Just powdered gravy on tasteless old turkey and untoasted thin wonder bread. The reuben was better than the turkey, they did get the correct ratio of thousand island dressing, sauerkraut, and corned beef, but also very thin bread with hardly any flavor. It was just bad food. It’s maybe unnecessary to pile on more complaints, but The menus were over used, very hard to read because the print was too light colored. It was, overall,...