Bassett Street Brunch Club — Restaurant in Madison

We experienced horrible service during lunch yesterday. We will never return. It started off by the 6 of us waiting more than 10 minutes for water.

The place was not busy. Now we know why.

Three of us had tried several times to catch the attention of the hostess (our table was immediately next to her); each of us said yes, she DID make eye contact...and each time she looked the other way. Two of the times we were trying to notify someone that bacon was in my sister's meal when she had requested none, and the other time we were looking for a second beverage (iced tea, tomato juice, chai, etc ).

When our server finally made her way to our booth that one and only time during our meal, we felt like she did not want to be there. (We saw that she and another server had enough time to chat toward the other side of the restaurant.) I told her about the bacon, and the server replied with a blank 'sorry' and shrugged her shoulders. She then offered to have it remade and my sister said no, we can't be here even longer (hint hint) because she had to leave for an appointment. The server started to turn away, and I jumped in with 'AH, we'd like more beverages, please.' She said 'Oh, ok.' (Seriously?) My sister picked out the bacon..she couldn't rely on timely service.

They ran out of tomato juice. That in itself is no problem. However, the server didn't offer an alternative of any kind, which it seems all other places do. You know, like 'Sorry but we're out of tomato. Would you like bloody Mary mix or another juice? We have orange, grapefruit, apple and cranberry.' Nope. Nothing. She was silent. I then asked if they had grapefruit juice and I did get that.

She returned with our second round of beverages, but not again until she brought the bill. Which also was wrong. When she took our orders I had requested separate checks--2 people on one and 4 on another. She had put all on one. She said 'Oh...ok' (like it was a new request!), left, and came back with two bills. Unfortunately, she didn't adjust my sister's breakfast in any way for the bacon error. Really? Couldn't even comp her iced tea? Wow.

We were (are) not a boisterous or demanding group. My sister was visiting from Dubuque, and we intended to enjoy a nice meal with catch-up chat. We wound up feeling very, very disappointed in the service. The food was mid at best in...

What happened to this place?!?!

Sad to see a formerly great place go so downhill.

It used to be great. Good atmosphere, good food, especially the chicken donut meal!

The chicken donut used to be the best and most unique thing they had that you couldn't get anywhere else. Now they have replaced it with chicken and waffles which you can get literally everywhere else. How is that an upgrade? Why do you think you have so many donuts left at the end of the day in your donut case? Duh!

But now, this place is a No Go!

Yesterday I arrived to a totally different layout {there was nothing wrong with the old layout, but....Ok) and totally different menus.

That right, I said menus, because now apparently they have an AM and PM menu and if you come in the PM, most of the breakfasty stuff is gone...fail!

Menu totally changed. With most of our favorite stuff gone we just ordered a burger and a club sandwich figuring those would be the safest bets. Nope. They were terrible!

I've had better gas station burgers. You could tell this one was just a previously frozen hockey puck of beef, ill-seasoned, with some mediocre American cheese slapped on top, weirdly-doughy non-toasted kaiser roll, and some weird house-made sauce on it.

Their burgers used to be awesome, this burger was actively bad.

The club sandwich was even worse! Limp soggy bacon, tasteless guacamole, dry chewy turkey, and worst of all some kind of watery smoky mayonnaise that they called "garlic aioli."

They put so much of this stuff on the sandwich that it was literally falling out while being eaten, it was nasty nasty nasty, with no hint of garlic at all.

On top of all this, when I asked for some mustard for my hamburger, we were informed that since the new ownership took over, there apparently is no mustard of any kind in the entirety of the restaurant!

That's right not one bottle! How are you going to be a restaurant that has sandwiches and not have any type of mustard?

Finally they brought me out some sort of hot honey mustard that was more honey than mustard and made the burger taste worse.

It was just an awful awful experience. They need to bring back the old menu, BRING BACK THE CHICKEN DONUT, and fix this place back to what it used to be.

Until then we are never ever ever coming...

I want to preface this by saying I don't normally write reviews. However, I felt compelled to for Bassett Street Brunch Club because of how terribly we were treated. It was my friend's birthday and me and our group of friends went in person to get a table. They told us that the wait time would be an hour and a half which was fine with us. They said that we would get a text when our table was ready, so we decided to explore State St while we waited. 1 hour and a half passes by and we get no text. We called them to see what was going on and they told us that we had been taken off the waitlist because we didn't respond. We told them that we didn't get a text, and they said that if we came now, we could get a table that had just opened up. We told them that it would take us 10 minutes to get there, and they said that was fine.

When we got there, we explained to the hostess what had happened, and she kept repeating that they sent the text. We even showed her the texts that we received from the phone and that there was clearly no text from them. What's even worse is that even though we showed up within 10 minutes, they had given up our table already! When we questioned the host about this, she started showing attitude, was extremely rude and defensive, and did not care to help us whatsoever.

She then said that if we waited another 10 minutes, we could get the next table. We agreed and waited for another 20 minutes, but no one came to show us to our table. At this point, we were all fed up of Bassett and extremely offended at their lack of adequate service. We left from the main entrance and the hostess saw us leave and didn't acknowledge our departure, letting me know that she never intended to seat us.

Horrible, horrible service, and I will never be returning here again!! It could also be that our whole group were women of color, so there could have been some racial discrimination involved, especially since I saw other white people being seated before us. They ruined my friend's birthday, so people beware and don't waste your time with Bassett Street...