Boathouse At The Riverside — Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale

My husband and I met friends (a biracial female couple) for dinner and had a terrible dining experience. We arrived at 6:45 and were told there would be a 45 minute wait. We saw there were plenty of empty tables but didn't question the hostess. After an hour, we still hadn't received the text from the hostess stand and there were still plenty of empty tables. My husband questioned the hostess and, ironically we were immediately sat. When our waiter, Dan, greeted us he asked my friend if she played basketball (stereotyping her height and race) and immediately we were all uncomfortable. We ordered appetizers which came out in a timely manner and then we placed orders our dinners. Runners, not Dan, delivered all but one of our meals without explanation. Yes, it would be the one that my tall, beautiful, black girlfriend ordered - a salmon dish. Dan had literally disappeared. No one came back with the missing dish. After 10 minutes Dan finally emerged and we had to wave him down. He never came over to check on us after our meals were delivered (or not) and said he'd go check. After another 5 minutes or so he came back to say the salmon was still on the grill and it would be another 10 to 15 minutes before it was done. So..... Three people are sitting with their meals getting cold, waiting for our friend to get her dinner. We had our plates in front of us for a whole 30 minutes before she got her dinner served. No explanation, no apology, no compensation, no offer to warm our meals... NOTHING! We absolutely feel that this was no mistake but a direct reflection of treating people of color differently, stereotyping, and not giving a single care about customer service, diversity, humanity, equality, or professionalism. I hope whoever reads this understands the hurt we felt for our friend, the utter disregard Dan had for us, and the fact that we did not make a scene or complain to management on site because: 1) there was no one to talk to and 2) we didn't want to embarrass our friend any further. We cannot state with any more conviction that we feel our friend was discriminated against and want...

I really love being able to go out to lunch, brunch or dinner by boat. Though docking at the Boathouse at the Riverside with its limited docking areas can be problematic on weekends or busy on season times, I've usually little trouble finding room to dock my 28 footer at other times. And being able to go by boat is a big, big plus for me. The other big plus with the Boathouse is being right on the New River enjoying the views. As I'm into people watching and boat watching, it is here that I get to do both at the same time. The array of varying boats and party people that go by is really like no other place on earth. You'll see everything from multimillion dollar super yachts to floating Tiki huts. Then sailboats, power boats, people rigging their poles and bait for fishing and of course the younger whooping and hollering party sets.

Being a part of the Riverside Hotel, you can pretty much be rest assured that things at the Boathouse are generally run right with good service and top notch fresh ingredients in their foods. However, the Boathouse is really not meant for a full dinner or big meal or for the really hungry. It's basically a tapas and small bites restaurant, which to me is a rather sad case, but their tapas and small bites are delicious and when hungry I just eat a lot more of them which in a nice way gives me wide choices in what foods I want to eat.

Recently I had their "Chilled Shrimp" which was delightfully done with a paprika lemon based sauce, their "Meats" being a plate with marvelous duck prosciutto, a Serrano ham, Spanish chorizo, bresaola with an age coppa. Then not to stop there, a "Boat House Board" ($16), a smoked fish dip ($10), some octopus fritters ($8.00; they were really good), and some duck fat potatoes ($6).

The food is overall good, some of it totally delicious, unique and innovative all within a casual atmosphere with...

Maybe my expectations were too high? The only good thing about this place was the fries and boats. The restaurant was dirty. We had to have the table re-cleaned because there was still food on them. The seats outside were really stained and had food still in them.

The service was horrible! After waiting 35 mins for a table, even though the restaurant wasn’t extremely busy we then waited another 15 mins for our server to finally show up and take our drink orders. This would be one of only 3 times our server even showed up. Luckily- they brought water with our drinks because we were never asked for refills even though our empty glasses sat on the edge of the table for almost an hour due to the incredibly slow service. We tried 2 times to get our server’s attention unsuccessfully. We asked another employee for refills and they said they would grab our server, they must’ve fell in the water or something because we never seen them again and our server never came.

The food was okay at best. Very bland except for the fries my son ordered. They were actually good and I don’t care for fries. I had blackened snapper that was flavorless, my wife’s salmon was also flavorless and her veggies were too burnt to eat.

To make the entire experience worse, our waiter charged someone else’s ticket, which was a LOT more than ours, to our card. The manager lied about how he fixed the issue. He stated he corrected the pre-authorization amount and the extra amount would fall off in a day. I had to ask for the receipts and the only one they would give me was for my real ticket. Why? Because he actually went ahead and charged our card again for our amount too, not correct the pre-authorization. Now, I have 2 charges from them as the other persons ticket never fell off because they never reversed that transaction and has posted. I have to dispute this now. I would...