Sundy House — Restaurant in Delray Beach

Where should I start? I want to give it zero stars.

The Good: The restaurant is beautiful, and the gardens are very nice. The seared tuna, I highly recommend. That is all.

The Bad: Hands down the worst service I have ever encountered at a restaurant. That says a lot. I was born and raised in South Florida and now live in D.C. When I was home for the holidays I decided to take my parents and sister out for a nice dinner. My sister has eaten here a few times and highly recommended it.

The service started out terrible, the waiter barely spoke English. That is fine, but when you are paying 25ish an entree, you don't expect a language barrier. The restaurant has a drink menu: wines; cocktails, and mixed drinks. The menu for some reason does not have the beer listed. When asking the waiter what beer they have, he proceeds to list them by color. "We have anything you can think of, a dark and a light, and a little more dark one." "I like the dark one, it good [sic]." When proceeding to ask him of brands and types, he has to go back to the bar, no less than 5 times to remember what the beers were. It's not a secret recipe, write them down.

Beer order finally in. Drinks come. Time to order food.

The waiter then proceeds to read the specials, great. When asked how much the catch of the day was, he proceeds to tell us "it's marked on the menu." Problem is, the menu says market price. He then says"somewhere between 25-35." That's fine at a Chili's, but not when you're serving a table of 6 at a higher end restaurant.

We place our order.

Dinner served! The food we ordered comes out correct, as in what was listed. I'm impressed because the waiter read off what we ordered wrong twice. But I've got to give credit where credit is due. Problem is, the two fillets that were order come out almost raw. Too bad they ordered medium-well. We try and send it back. Problem is, we never see the waiter again. He is gone, like a fart in the wind. We finally flag down another waiter, he takes care of the problem and brings back the non freshly killed fillets.

My father ordered a "strip steak." I use that term loosely because it was mostly fat. And by mostly, I mean 3/4 of the "strip steak," for $38. My father, not being one to complain, eats the steak quietly. After finishing the small portion of the meat, we look over to see most of his place is covered with a massive piece of fat.

We finally find the waiter when it's time for him to bring the bill. We notify him of the steak and he doesn't say a word. I am not sure if he couldn't think of English or he didn't know how to respond. We ask for a manager. This is where the fun begins.

When the manager arrives, we wanted to show him how bad of a cut this was. We weren't looking for hand outs, just a "hey you should go check your stock." The manager gets very defensive and tells us "they hand cut eat piece" and "that is how a strip steak comes," "you must not eat steaks a lot." Completely, classless and not one ounce of remorse, not a "I'm sorry you didn't like it." Just a complete ass. He passed the buck to anyone he could think of, the butcher, the place that they get the steaks from, the cook, the waiter, hell even the valet. Someone like that shouldn't have a job.

Now it's time for the bill. Oh look they added 20% because we have 6 people, and didn't take anything off because of the food coming out wrong. No, they added 20%. I understand doing 15% or even 18%, but 20%?! That's for good-excellent service. We didn't see the guy all night. He knew he would get his 20% so he could give two S*&ts. What a crook!!!

I highly highly highly recommend finding someplace else to go. Don't waste your time, find some other place. Even the building can't overcome how bad of a place this was! We eat out a lot, this was hands down the worst. If you want terrible steaks go eat at Outback or Longhorn, save yourself $200. If I could give it 0...

Beautiful landscaping, wonderful location. Everything else was terrible. We stayed for a wedding that I was in. My room was supposed to be a suite and have a mini fridge and a couch in case my niece or nephew wanted to stay with me instead of their parents. Instead, I had a room with full trash cans, dirty robes in the closet, dirty towels folded in the closet, dirty floor, no fridge or couch there was also a fire alarm panel with had a terrible high pitched alarm going off the entire first day and night. When we attempted to call the desk or maintenance or any of the number on our welcome sheet, we got no answer. I had to get clean towels from house keeper that I chased down one of the beautiful pathways because when I called to ask for some, no one ever answered. They gave us a bucket of I e instead of switching to the room I asked for initially and never offered to fix any of the other problems. My boyfriend actually missed the majority of the reception because of the alarm situation. At one point someone told him they silenced it- they didn't and that is also illegal because IT IS A FIRE ALARM. The room was definitely not worth the money and I regret agreeing to stay on site. I barely managed to get 4 hours of sleep before my friend's wedding. Barely. This is also due to the landscaping people starting to leaf blow the pathways as soon as the sun came up. I understand that somewhere this beautiful requires a lot of upkeep, but what the hell happened to hotels waiting until 8 or 9 am before the start waking up their guests for cleaning service? Which, they apparently only do outside considering how filthy my room was.

Let's move on to the service. So, we had a set meal for the reception. I was seriously so excited about the food because my friends said it is one of the top restaurants with high ranking chefs and all that. They've supposedly won awards. My steak was so rare that is was cold. I mean, they seated the edges and put it on a plate at refrigerator temperature. So I obviously asked for it to be cooked to medium because it was cold. Five minutes later I get a new plate and the server takes me full glass that I had JUST gotten from the bar. I check my steak, its a medium rare piece now but at least it isn't cold. So I go to get a new drink from the bar leaving my completely untouched food sitting with my date at the table. Buy the time I get back, my food is gone and my date is trying to get it back. I tried to get any of the servers to bring me back my completely untouched meL and none of them would. By the time I got back to my table, I discovered that they served the cake too. I didn't even get a slice of cake. I paid a lot of money to stay in a beautiful place only to be tortured all night by fire alarms and starved by the staff. You have no idea how badly I wanted to throw a fit and demand a manager. The only reason there is only a bad review is because I did not want to ruin my friend's wedding. I went out of my way to ensure she didn't have a single thing go wrong and I ended up entirely miserable and starving. Worst...

We checked in on the Saturday before Independence Day and I'd made reservations for dinner that night, having specified we wanted indoor seating, given the muggy July heat and recent rains. I reiterated that to the front desk clerk when we checked in. First thing we noticed in our beautiful Tamarind Room, was there were several light bulbs that were out, which kept us from noticing the floor weren't swept very clean. The staffer who took us to the room told me housekeeping was gone for the day, but she'd tell someone to replace them, especially one over the bathroom sink which made it shadowy, and one in the closet, so we could see the safe touch pad. No one ever came to take care of that in the 2 nights we spent there. Sunday morning, we slept in, having been to 2 clubs late the night before. There's no "do not disturb" sign to hang on the doorknob, so there was no way for them to know we were just getting up. I heard the door beep and in walked a housekeeping lady! She backed out and said she'd come back later. I told her she really should knock before just coming in. We left the room a while later, and I noticed the housekeeping cart was below our floor. close to our room. Just to make sure, I reminded the staffer who'd taken us to our room the previous day, that they could make up the room now. We got back from dinner at 9:30 and no one had come in to do anything. They'd left a green laundry duffel with fresh towels, before the lady had barged in. We ended up checking out Monday morning, having to use the fresh towels they'd left on the folding luggage rack, since the towels take very long to dry out in the room, even with the AC running. On the positive side, this is a beautiful property, the rooms, gardens, walkway, fountains, pools with Coi, etc. It has several sizes of gazebos and most have overhead fans. The ideal time to visit is not in the dead of FL summer, cooler weather will make for a much more enjoyable outdoor experience. The 4-poster king bed was very comfy. The bathroom was spacious, it could have used a small shelf to put toiletries near the small pedestal sink. There was good water pressure and reasonably hot water, the shower diverter was a bit funky to operate, but it worked. My impression of Sundy House, based on our experience, is that their big money maker and priority is the dining, lodging not getting too much attention. They have plenty of free parking and the location is prime for getting to all the places and activities on nearby Atlantic Ave. I'll post a separate review of their Taru...