El Parian Steaks & Tequila - Lancaster — Restaurant in Hocking Township

I’d like to preface this review with the fact that I have never given any establishment a one star review. As a former service worker I always tend to be understanding and forgiving of service slights but The Downtown Bistro failed us on almost every level possible.

A friend and I were excited to stop here on our way to Hocking Hills for lunch having researched places on our way in. The establishment wasn’t very busy when we walked in. The hostess seated us without a word, I said “Thank you so much!” when she placed our menus down but she didn’t acknowledge me and just turned around and walked away.

Our waitress came over and took our drink and appetizer order. I ordered an old fashioned which turned out to be the only decent thing about my experience. For my appetizer I had the crab cakes which was more like breadcrumb cakes with barely even a hint of crab. I also tried the stuffed mushrooms my friend ordered and while she enjoyed them, I didn’t find anything special about small 13 dollar mushroom caps.

After a disappointing appetizer and a strange interaction with the waitress when inquiring about their daily specials (one she claimed was simply “chimichurri”), I decided to just order their lobster bisque. The menu says they only serve it on Fridays and Saturdays so I thought it must surely be good and fresh! Well it was neither. The Lobster bisque had no lobster and wasn’t even a bisque! It was some sort of tomato broth monstrosity.

What was even more horrific was the steak that was delivered to my friend. She ordered it medium rare but what she received was some sort of rare, pre-seared, boiled looking, unappetizing piece of meat (please see photo). When the waitress eventually came back over my friend told her, “I didn’t care for this.” The waitress simply said, “ok” and took it away. No apology or sincerity (which was her general disposition, odd for someone who expects to be tipped).

She seemed generally annoyed and bothered by us throughout the entirety of our stay.

The Downtown Bistro is lacking in both edible food and halfway decent service and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this was the worst experience I’ve ever had at...

Atmosphere is nicer than most Mexican restaurants. Food is good. Service could definitely be more consistent. My first two visits with my husband, the service was pretty decent, but a recent visit with a friend was definitely not good. We were seated at a back table outside after a very short wait, only to sit there for 25 minutes and no wait person had even looked our way. I finally waved someone down to take our drink order. My friend ordered a drink on the rocks and was told that drink couldn't be made on the rocks, so she quickly opened her menu to look for an alternative and the waiter says... "Andale!!".. after we waited over 25 minutes for him...SMH.. so she ordered a house margarita no salt on the rim. (It eventually came with salt on the rim.) First we were brought the wrong drinks, but he ran off before we could tell him. Then, 5 minutes later, we were given our drinks, which had already been on someone else's table. The drinks were taken off of our table and given to the other people... 😬They don't know we didn't drink out of them! Anything could have been done to those drinks!. 🤷‍♀️ Beware! There's a reason there's no drink prices listed on the menu. My food was reasonable. I got a nice sized bowl for $15. But my very unimpressive, mostly ice, no mint leaf, mojito was $14! For. one. drink. Ridiculous. We were charged for extra sour cream. Never mind we were half finished with our food by the time they brought it to us. And they never came back with salsa we asked for. I know they were busy, but they seemed to only see the tables in the front and totally ignored the tables in the back. The people around us were also complaining about the same. We'd give it another try on a weekday, but I doubt that we would go back...

We were at this location on Friday night, August 15, at 5p. We were seated promptly as it was not that busy. After that, the whole experience went down hill. We sat at our table for approximately 10 minutes before being acknowledged, even though many of the wait staff passed by and just looked at us. I had to ask a wait staff who our waitress was as we would like to order. This individual has to go find out as she didn't know. After a few minutes, a waitress finally appeared wanting to take our drink order. We mentioned that we were ready to order at which time she took the order. Another few minutes pass by and our food order is delivered. However, we never saw the waitress who took our order come around asking if everything was ok or if we needed anything. When we were ready to leave, we waited to see if the waitress would stop by with the check. Needless to say, that didn't happen and once again we had to ask for our check, which to another few minutes. One individual in our party had to go to the front desk and ask once again who the waitress was. It was then the original waitress finally stopped by and we mentioned that we wanted our check. At that time, it was asked what we ordered as we were a party of three with two separate checks. This information should be known. Our visit to this location is the last, we will not be back. In closing, and just from observation, it appeared there was a confused wait staff not knowing which...