Shady Gators — Restaurant in Missouri

If you don’t want to sweat for your entire stay, then be ignored when you try to call the owner about a refund, please do you and your friends a favor and DO NOT STAY HERE.

We stayed in one “The Villas” for my friend’s bachelor party in August of 2023. We arrived on a Friday and went immediately to Lazy gators. When we got back to our rental that evening, we found the temperature at 81 degrees. I contacted the manager requesting that they unlock the box so that we could turn the temperature down. Instead of waiting, we got dressed and went out to get out of the heat. Once we returned that evening, it was still 80 degrees, and the vents were not blowing cold air. I contacted the manager again to let her know of the issue but did not receive a response. We attempted to sleep that evening and not let it ruin our weekend in the hopes they could fix it the next day.

On Saturday morning, I contacted the manager again and let her know that the temperature was still at 78 degrees and requested that they come look at it. The cleaning lady came back and turned the A/C down again. It still was not working, so she shut it off and told us it was frozen. We already had plans that day, so we left thinking it would be fixed when we got back. When we returned that evening it was 84 degrees. We knew that the property manager had not responded to us the night before when we had contacted her that late, so we decided to just suffer through another night and contact them in the morning.

After leaving that weekend, it was obvious that Shady Gator’s maintenance and management staff was not concerned with their customers’ experience. I was hoping though that another manager/owner would capitulate given our terrible experience while staying with them. Oh, how I was wrong though. Instead of handling the situation professionally, my calls were ignored. I called the property manager numerous times to see who I needed to talk to about this. she finally texted me that she was not an owner, and I would need to call JG. When I called JG, I was ignored as well, so I sent him texts explaining the situation. He finally texted me back on Thursday of the next week and told me that he was swamped the whole weekend and requested that I call him back on Monday. When I called him on Monday there was still no answer. I have not heard from him since and have come to terms with the fact that this is how they operate as a company.

This is why I am here, to warn everyone of the poor quality and care that this business represents. If you are planning on staying at Lake of the Ozarks with a group of people, I urge you to take the above situation into consideration before determining who you will be...

I’ve been to Shady Gators before on multiple occasions, service is usually decent, the food and drinks are pretty good, some people may complain about price but the portions are usually large. This weekend it was clearly busy with a lot of college kids, and they were training a couple new people. I arrived with just me and my boyfriend and we asked the bartender if there was a host or if we should just take a seat wherever and we were told to just take a seat and someone would be with us. We then watched a host seat multiple other groups for a total of at least 20 people while we sat and waited for menus for over 10 minutes. Finally, the server came over and saw we didn’t have menus and went and grabbed some. Her and one of the other girls had said that they were new and it was their first day and we were very understanding. We had 3 more friends join our table and she was very accommodating especially considering she was clearly overwhelmed and did not have someone with her helping her or showing her the ropes. We understood there would be wait times for food and drink and did not have a problem with it and tried to be as nice as possible because there was a lot going on and we could tell. When we asked for our checks we had to wait a while and were okay with that, but then another woman came to the table after about 15 minutes and asked if we were the table with x items on our receipts, we said no we had this, this, and this, and she proceeded to cuss at us about how it was the servers first day. I know other people may not have been very nice to the waitress but we were incredibly patient with her and never once rude and did not deserve for this other woman to curse at our table. I wish they would do a better job with helping out their employees and helping this girl take care of things without being outright rude to customers. I am still willing to go back but this was not a good experience and definitely made me wary of the...

Took over an hour and a half to get our food. Server had no idea what she was doing then completely forgot about us. .. thats fine, mistakes happen.. BUT unfortunately my little sister forgot her purse in her chair because we were so ready to get out of there. We called 30 minutes later to see if anyone found the purse. They said that they did in fact have it and would put it up in the office. We arrived back at the restaurant exactly 45 minutes later; same staff, same manager, SAME WAITRESS. We then asked about the purse to the hostess, who was the only trustworthy employee there with a positive attitude, and she stated she noticed the waitress grab it earlier. At the same time, we made eye contact with our waitress, who proceeded to quickly run in the opposite direction. No one could find her or the purse for another 45 minutes. The manager then approached us. When we asked about the purse she cussed at us and got in our face.. drawing so much attention that the cops were called over by another customer. We were then told by an employee that there was actually a camera pointing right at our table and they would pull the footage for us. After another 5 minutes, that same manager (who, in the mean time, was pulled aside by the cops for acting completely out of line) rudely came over and told us that her employees did not know what they were talking about and that the camera was a "fake". So after almost 2 hours of the manager screaming at us and proceeding to cause an unnecessary scene, cops and customers surrounding us.. our waitresses "boyfriend " runs over from the fraternity house that is on the property, and throws my sisters purse at her and then runs off.

SHADY is the PERFECT name for this place. I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemy let alone family, friends, or...