Dutch's At Silver Tree Restaurant — Restaurant in Maryland

Wow wow wow. I can’t believe the experience we had with this place and the manager or whoever the dictator was who reprimanded me. We rented a house for the week in McHenry. It was off-season so not a lot was open. I made reservations at this restaurant on Tuesday for a Thursday night dinner at 5:00 for 10 people (8 adults and 2 kids 12 and 8). As Thursday was rolling along, I realized we were running a little behind. It’s like herding cats trying to get 10 people ready for anything! I called at about 2:00 the day of the reservation to request that the reservation be pushed to 6:00 and if it were possible. There is some man (the Dictator) who answered the phone and who needs to go back to hospitality school! He was extremely rude and abrupt on the phone and said they absolutely could not push us to 6:00 but that we could come at 5:30. I thought to myself, ok. Seems a little strict but we’ll make it work. Of course, when it came time for dinner, we were late to the restaurant. I looked at my phone and it said 5:37 when my 72 year old mother and I made it to the host’s stand. There was a very nice host who looked terrified when I told her my name. She said, I’m sorry we have you down for 5:00. She then turned her head slowly to General Restaurant Dictator and he’s shaking his head and tapping his watch at me! This is a fine dining establishment and this is the behavior towards people about to spend a ridiculous amount of money on salmon?? I don’t care if we were an hour late!! He then proceeds to remind me that he told me to have my party there between 5:15 and 5:30. (He never said anything about 5:15). He says, you are really putting us in an inconvenient position, but come on, I’ll seat you anyway. What? No thanks!! We’ll spend hundreds of dollars somewhere else where we don’t have to be abused and where we’ll be welcomed! So, we said no thank you and went to leave and the Dictator yelled after us, “have a great night!” It was honestly just so out of bounds and insane. I thought Ashton Kutcher was going to jump out and tell us we were being punked. So, we walked back out into the parking lot and told our friends and family we weren’t welcome to eat at Dutch’s at Silver Tree. We decided to go to Uno’s down the road, (again, not a lot of choices) and proceeded to have a surprisingly nice meal on their back patio by the nicest and sweetest server named Brad who didn’t yell at me once!! Brad was lovely and really saved our night. Thank you UNO’s and Brad!! Dear General Restaurant Dictator at Dutch’s at Silver Tree, you need some sensitivity training!! Your own coworkers are...

Maybe our expectations were too high? Given the prices and need for a reservation, we thought this would be a slightly elegant, delicious way to end our week at DCL. We asked to sit outside, thinking it would be a lovely, on-the-water, evening-light/sunset atmosphere. Instead, the outside was like a marina bar—very loud and informal. The bar was very loud, and the tables around us were boisterous and loud. Having walked through the dark and quiet upstairs dining room to get to the outside area, it was quite a shock to our ears! There is a playground directly adjacent the dining area. One woman was wearing a bathing suit and see-through cover-up only. It was not what we were hoping for.

We asked for a table inside and was told there was an hour wait. Then someone said they had a table inside for us, but when they took us there, it was not upstairs in the dining room, but rather in the indoor bar area downstairs. We were really impressed that they created this impromptu table for us (I know it was a strain on our waitress; she clearly was not used to serving there and forgot several times something that we requested). At first, it was quiet, and we were so relieved.

Within 45 minutes, the inside bar filled up with people from some kind of conference (wearing name tags). The volume got louder and louder until it was ridiculous. I could not hear anything anyone at my table said, even if they were right next to me. What we hoped would be a last night of swapping family stories and sharing conversation turned out be a (very expensive) ordeal we got through as quickly as possible.

I can’t blame the restaurant; instead, I just want to warn patrons: if you want quiet, eat INSIDE and UPSTAIRS. The rest is a loud bar atmosphere. If that’s what you want, great!

The food was just okay. I was impressed with the amount of crab in my crab cake. I was not impressed with the cream of crab soup—it tasted like canned cream of mushroom soup with some crab in it. The calamari and zucchini appetizers were tasteless without sauce. The portions were big. The flavors were very simple.

I am so sad that we spent over $500 for our dinner there when a dinner at home would have been much more relaxing and...

We came to Deep Creek for a small family vacation and this was attached to where we booked our suite. We have three smaller kids 9 (twins) and 7 years old. We told them as a reward we were going to take them to a nice dinner. They all brought something to dress up in and we made reservations far in advance. As soon as we got there the waitress was visibly annoyed we had kids. Very well behaved kids. She immediately took the glass water cups away from the kids. She actually took one straight from my daughters hand and had them replaced them with styrofoam. The kids were a bit disappointed as they are old enough to handle a cup. We traded our glass for their cups and again she took them. We all ordered. Kids weren’t crazy about the chicken tenders. I tasted them and they just tasted like old oil or a different coating like fish fry. They ate everything else and didn’t complain. Just asked us if they could not eat it and leave it on their plate. A group of very rowdy men were seated beside us and started ordering large amounts of food and alcohol and our waitress, who was extremely annoyed to have kids at the table literally asked if we needed anything because she had this other table she needs to spend time with. She sat over there and chatted and earned her tip with them. Was extremely unpleasant to us. We finish up and she asks if the kids want a box and I said no we are traveling. I asked her if they had a dessert which Dutch’s daughter (parent co) has and she said she didn’t have time to talk to me. She rolled her eyes and said something to the effect of “I assume the kids don’t want dessert since they didn’t eat”. We fully expected to pay the $400 plus our bill was but we didn’t expect our kids to be treated so poorly. Our food was good. I am so disappointed that our kids didn’t get the experience they deserve for their first fancy dinner. I promised them we would try again elsewhere. I expected to be treated with some level of respect. I tipped her because she did do her job, but extremely unpleasantly. We deserved better...