THE PRESS ROOM — Restaurant in Kirksville

Needs work. The food is excellent at competitive prices. I’ve been once before and the food and service were on point. It is based on that first impression that I generously award this establishment 3 stars—I would like to punish it to the maximum extent over the experience I had tonight. What I am about to describe SHOULD be a restaurant owner’s worst nightmare, but somehow it is the intended DESIGN of this establishment. If anyone reads these and has a vested interest in the success of this restaurant, they need to read carefully. Put yourself in the shoes of your patrons. Understand that competition is a vital part of owning a business and understand how unforgiving patrons are. I am one of them, and knowing I have options, I resolved not to come back after what I experienced tonight. This is a hard lesson business owners have to learn if they ever want to find success. You lose customers over things that seem trivial to YOU—but are actually all-important.

I am harsh because this restaurant has too much potential to get flushed down the revolving toilet of failed restaurants in kirskville.

We walked in at 9:15 on a Saturday night to a sign reading “please seat yourself,” so we did. There were all of TWO tables with patrons sitting at them in the entire restaurant. We sat at our table for 15 minutes, wondering if anyone was ever gonna notice us. After all, if you invite people to seat themselves you need to be on the lookout.

We counted no less than FIVE staff behind the bar, totally ignoring us. After a long while, we turned our attention to this tiny, insignificant little framed piece of paper that told us we should place our order using a QR code.

I have seen this before, so I pulled up the menu. First of all, it wasn’t even a menu. There were zero descriptions, photos, or explanations of what you might get if you ordered something from this menu. Just names of dishes. Come on. If the idea is to be MORE convenient, shouldn’t it be MORE convenient? But worse, we went to order and the site told us the kitchen was closed. HOW WOULD WE HAVE KNOWN THAT? The hours on Google said the restaurant was open until 1:30.

So now we have “seated ourselves” and placed an order, and we have completely wasted our time, and there was truly and completely no way to know beforehand. I went and got dominos. I was PISSED. I won’t come back.

Guys—number 1 rule of running a business—know your demographic. This isn’t New York City. No one wants to use QR codes to order in the first place, but I’d venture to say Kirksville would adapt just because you asked them. But you HAVE to have a real menu in your order portal, you HAVE to make your kitchen hours loud and unmissable, and you CANNOT let patrons sit at a table for 15 minutes when your staff could EASILY introduce them to the system. F* the system. You cannot let customers walk out the door without an interaction the way we did. Like I said before, FIVE employees behind the bar for TWO tables. We sat, and we sat, and we sat. And you know what, we left absolutely PISSED. I ended up getting dominos. And I swore I’d never go back in that restaurant again—and I won’t. Because I have zero respect for a business that is so callous and uncaring for its patrons. Guys—you have to do the bare minimum. Customer services matters, even in 2023. If you don’t think so, refer to the 2 tables out of ~20 that were seated when I walked in on a Saturday night.

P.S. This was the third time I’ve visited the Press Room. But I have only eaten once. That should say a lot about the communication and effectiveness of management here. The second time, there was a grand opening special or something where you had to buy a ticket for like $40 and eat a huge variety of foods, otherwise you couldn’t dine. Which is fine, but I’m learning that this is typical—there was no way to know that BEFORE you brought your behind allllllll the way to the Press Room. Why do I waste my time when I could go somewhere else? That’s the question you’ve...

Came in today at 1:00pm to eat lunch with 3 of my friends, Ethan Blevins from a review down was apart of that group. The vibes of the restaurant were classy and modern, I really enjoyed the music as well. But with that being said the experience itself was not it. First thing that I noticed was the environment was not clean! The carpeted floors were coated in a layer of crumbs and old food, the tabletops were not properly wiped off, and the plates were received were dirty. The bathrooms were littered in paper towels and toilet paper, one of the toilets was clogged, the trash was overflowing, and there were dirty dishes in the bathroom. I could tell our server was trying his best and we appreciate that but the kitchen took forever to get us our meal, we arrived at 1:00 and did not get our order of cheese curds and fried okra until almost 2:00. Working in a restaurant environment myself, I would understand the delay if you were busy, but at the time it was our group and another table of 6-7. Our food finally arrived but was not of the best quality, I ordered the chicken and waffles and my waffle was soggy along with my chicken being a grease bucket. Ethan’s chicken plate was the last one served but was ice cold, potatoes had no seasoning, green beans were shriveled, and he found a hair in his food. Our waiter was very gracious and did not make him pay as well as gave us a free dessert to apologize. Before leaving we were not asked if we would like to take our leftover with us so we proceeded by taking to go boxes from a nearby counter to box our remains. 1/5...

I do not have high standards but this was disappointing. I came here with my friends and we should have followed our first impressions and left while we could. The menu was full of typos and was missing information about the dishes. We were one of three tables and our food took over an hour to arrive. The food itself was not good. The kitchen was out of things and the food we got was covered in grease. I was very uncomfortable here.

Edit: I did not use my legal name in this review, as the owner seems to have no issues airing their employees' information in other responses to reviews and I did not want to compromise my own privacy. I can confirm that I did in fact eat at the Press Room where I ordered chicken tenders with onion rings and had a dirty shirley which the owner should be able to see. I did expect some grease with my food but the amount of grease was overwhelming and none of us were able to finish our food. It seems that the menu is curated with more attention to keeping it on one page rather than attention to detail. The aggressive response to my review leaves me thinking that focus is being directed in the wrong directions and that food quality is not being...