Bonefish Grill — Restaurant in Knoxville

Bonefish is not the most expensive restaurant in town, but surely patrons deserve much, much more than we received that afternoon. The service was terrible. The mood among the staff was apathetic (except for the manager), and the atmosphere and environment was not at all welcoming. All of this is made almost tolerable if the food is outstanding. It was ok, but nothing special. If I were the owner, I would find this totally unacceptable. Hopefully this is not the norm at this Bonefish Grill, but I am not sure I will find out. There are a lot of other restaurants in town who will welcome our business. (If you want details, read on)

I am always reluctant to give bad reviews, so I don't do many. I understand businesses are having a difficult time attracting and keeping good help, but having said that, I have received good service from many restaurants in our area and beyond. I can't say that about our visit to the Bonefish Grill on Parkside Drive last Friday afternoon. It was around 2:00 and the place was mostly empty, so the server was not swamped with a zillion tables to cover.

First, we waited for quite some while before our server seemed to notice us and come to our table. We ordered wine and my wife asked about how fresh the fish was. Georgia, as I learned from the manager, disappeared to find out and only returned after a lengthy wait with our wine and seemed to have completely forgotten about our fish inquiry. When my wife asked again, she replied she didn't think there was anything fresh this time of day. We placed our orders, which didn't include fish, and Georgia was off. This left us there with our wine, no bread, appetizers, anything. Out of frustration I asked our host, clad in an unbuttoned flannel shirt with a colored tee underneath ,who was bussing a table near us if they served bread. He said sure and came back immediately with some. It never occured to Georgia to offer.

Our meals arrived at last, and I had mashed potatoes, not baked as I had ordered with my steak. When I questioned her about it, she said they didn't have baked potatoes. Maybe you should have told me, I suggested. Her reply was, all I heard was potatoes. At this point the manager arrived, seeing our frustration, and asked what she could do to make things better. We got free desserts and an apology. At least it was something, an acknowledgement that things weren't going as well as they should have. And I found out later, that all the while, behind me sat off duty staff, eating fast food, with their large, white paper bags cluttering their table. And to add to our dining wows, apparently someone had spilled a drink earlier. The floor was sticky, not only around our table, but at the table we moved to to get...

I generally don't leave a whole lot of reviews however I felt Bonefish earned this. This is supposed to be an upscale restaurant however I have seen applebees run better with respect to serving customers. I walked in with my family on Sunday at 12:30pm. They were not busy and we were seated within seconds of arrival, so far so good. After waiting close to 10 minutes at the table without seeing any wait staff to greet us and/or take our drink order I went and got the greeter and let her know. She apologized and said someone would be right there. We waited another 4-5 minutes before we stood up and slowly walked out. Never saw anyone approach us or our table. At most upper scale restaurants the wait staff has less than a minute to at least acknowledge you and managers walk the lobby to ensure folks are not overlooked. Bonefish made no effort. Maybe a 15 minute wait to even be greeted by the wait staff is asking to much but at a restaurant where we were planning on spending over a hundred bucks I expect better than at a place that will cost me less than half that. My families time is worth something. I doubt this review will cost them much, but it cost them at least a hundred bucks and a 20%+ tip. If bonefish reads this, my suggestion would be like other higher end establishments maybe have a floater that pays attention to guests and makes sure everyone gets served in a reasonable time, if Cracker Barrel can do it, you can too.

Edit Jason Sartain who claims to represent my local BoneFish (although he lives in Mississippi) reached out to me via facebook and asked for my number on Thursday. Which I responded and gave him within 5 and a half hours of his request. However we are now at Sunday and I still have yet to see him call my number (internet number so I can see all calls received). So he proved to me that there is a systematic issue at the Turkey Creek BoneFish (you can see for yourself by sorting for only negative reviews and the majority of them are service related). Honestly at this point this chain and the operator group needs to seriously look at the managing of this location and consider making personnel changes. Or they can ignore it and continue to lose customers some of whom are like myself who become verbal to help them stop issues like these, I am sure there is a vast majority that dont complain and just never go back. Good luck BoneFish...

Very disappointed in this location. We came for the meal for 2, specifically the tomato glazed grouper. Was told on arrival they no longer have it so no biggie but kinda sucked. Got Caesar salads and hubby ordered extra cheese (which he does every time he goes there) Ordered the cedar salmon and bistro filet med rare. Caesar had some weird clumps of cheese (we later found out was feta) and tasted off so he just took the off and ate maybe half the salad.

The salmon tasted like straight up bourbon and the filet was blue rare- medium (they slice it for you and it was so unevenly cooked.) it looked mangled it was sliced so bad…so I asked for something else. The server said he would ask his manager what I could get as a replacement since it was the only thing on that special menu that I wanted.

He came back and said the manager said “you can order whatever you want since the steak was so bad”. Most people would take that as ordering what they want as a replacement with no extra charge, right? WRONG. But I didn’t know that so I ordered the sea bass with potatoes. Potatoes were cold and had huge chunks of potato in them. Sea bass It was rubbery and not very tasty at all but I had already been there for almost 2 hours, was hungry and just wanted to eat and go so I did. They said since the steak was so bad and the meal had taken so long we could pick whatever dessert we wanted if we didn’t want the default one but we just took the default instead.

Got the bill- here’s the fun part. We were charged full price for the sea bass cost (a difference of $12). $2 for extra feta on a CEASAR salad (hubby HATES feta) They didn’t discount the appetizer to the price when added with the meal deal so the meal that should have been around $75 was $100 and it wasn’t even good. We asked the server and he explained everything and that he was new and was so sorry for the issues we had.

I have never heard of someone saying they would substitute a meal because the first was so bad and then charging full price for it…had I known I would be charged I would have complained about how rubbery and gross it was instead of covering it in sauce just to make it edible. Food here just isn’t what it use to be and I can’t see how I would go back.

Server was...