Applebee's Grill + Bar — Restaurant in La Plata

Decided to come to Applebees on my wife’s 35th birthday to grab some grub with myself, my wife, our two teen kids and the 4 year old. Another couple had walked in at the same time. We arrive into the restaurant at roughly 9:55 After about 5-6 minutes a waitress came and said it would be about 5 minutes as there were tables needing to be bussed. The other couple left immediately. We said no big deal. We sat up front in the lobby for 20 minutes before we followed suite and decided to also leave. In 20 minutes with 5 of us standing there not one server, manager bartender or any other Applebees employee even acknowledged us after first being told 5 minutes.

I walked to the restroom to see what was going on. There was not a sense of urgency from a single employee. I could understand a wait if they were swamped and tables needed to be bussed. However it appeared there were 3-4 servers on with maybe 4 tables in the restaurant. Since they didn’t have guest to tend to it shouldn’t have taken but 2 to 3 minutes to get a couple tables cleaned off. If they would have pre bussed each table should have only had cups and maybe one plate left. The dining room was a wreck. Each table full of dirty empty plates. It was completely dead in there. We were a party of 5, we didn’t need some large special table. We could have been sat at almost any of the tables. It felt like all of the servers were waiting to get cut and didn’t want to clean tables in their section and get sat with a party of 5 as they are hoping to get cut. I can speculate all day long, but at the end of the day the whole ordeal was just frustrating. And it takes quite a bit for me and my wife to get frustrated with servers. We’re both have served in bartended had a combined dozen places...

Been awhile since I've been at any Applebee's; after today's adventure, I suspect it'll be awhile longer before I venture there again. Took time to look over the menu, nothing really stood out except noticing prices have gone up-no surprise there, right. Also noticed that they still like to call throwing some seasoning on food then calling that Blackening; BTW, it's NOT! Look up what true Blackening is, it was created in New Orleans using intense heat and creates a ton of smoke. The food is cooked in mere seconds and is soo good. Spicy but very good... anyway, I digress. Ended up ordering the Tomato Basil soup and the Chicken Fajita rolls. The soup was fair, Applebee's tried to improve on it by adding some cheese and croutons. I've had amazing tomato basil soup before but not here or this was not. Cheese was lumpy, taste seemed a bit off, and value of the 4 oz dish vs cost is not there. Nope, won't have that again! As for that Chicken roll with so called spicy sauce on the side, well I left half of it on the table. The flavor was confused, with the lettuce (of all things) being the dominant flavor. Texture again mostly of lettuce swimming in some mediocre sauce with the chicken MIA. The only item that I really did enjoy were the French fries; I had asked for extra crispy and they arrived as requested. Service at the table was fair to good, so no complaints there. As for their greeter at the front, this gentleman seemed to be still working on figuring out his job of greeting me, and then taking me and a menu to a table. Maybe their Bourbon St steak is still as good as I remember, I can only hope. For me, it was just too early to order that and I hadn't wanted a burger hence the rationale of my order for...

Finally sat down inside, ceiling was absolutely disgusting and looked like mold throughout the restaurant. Waitress was less than impressive, we were there for well over an hour. It took at least 20 minutes after our drinks if not longer for her to come ask if we wanted to get an appetizer. She was given another table after us and they got all their stuff right away food included, at this point we were in the restaurant for over 45mins. I ordered a simple Grilled chicken oriental salad, I stated multiple times Chicken as she kept repeating just the oriental back to me, stated she wrote grilled and it was not. I got Fried chicken UNDER my salad which was overcooked and extremely dry, it was so hard to eat. Part of my dressing was missing, my child ordered chicken Alfredo and it was basically missing chicken, my child also asked for another drink and wasn’t brought one but my spouse was. We weren’t even given a chance to tell our waitress of her mistake as she kept rushing us and running off . My husband was only able to eat half his burger as it was soggy fast. We rarely eat out, and when we do we do take out to avoid as many issues as possible. Our waitress also complained about being sat another table loud enough that the family behind us which was just sat COULD HEAR her, it was extremely rude. I’ve been in the service industry for over 15 years, I could not believe what I was hearing. Tonight we felt like we wasted our money that could have been used at an establishment that had better waiting staff and more quality control as well as a cleaner...