Blue Bayou Restaurant & Oyster Bar — Restaurant in New Orleans

My wife and I had a terrible experience with this establishment. There were warning signs early that we ignored, so ultimately we could have avoided our lackluster dining experience. We walked up to the hostess station and were greeted by a young woman who was in the middle of dealing with her false eyelashes falling off, so we waited while she dealt with her personal emergency. She was very nice and apologetic for it, I'm sure that she was quite embarrassed. The restaurant wasn't busy at the moment, maybe a total of 5 tables, this is a large restaurant. We waited roughly 5 minutes for our server to greet us, placed a drink order along with an appetizer order. The server brought our waters and said our drinks would be out shortly. We started hearing the kitchen yelling for service for several minutes, the wait staff were elsewhere at this point, and then we started seeing the kitchen staff attempting to bring out the orders themselves. They were obviously confused as the whole each item was supposed to go to, but they were making an attempt. Kudos to the back of house for making an effort. They did make some negative comments about their coworkers as they were returning to the kitchen, we were sat by the kitchen so got to be the audience.

We received our appetizer after a few minutes of it being passed around from person to person before finally making it's way to our server. We waited 10 minutes for our drinks to finally make it to our table, not promising for such a large business that wasn't busy. We had ordered the crab cake appetizer, it was very small, good flavor and quite a lot of crab for what looks like a 3 ounce cake. I would have been a little happier for either a little more or little less expensive ($26), this is obviously in the heart of the tourist trap but this was egregious even with that in mind. My entree was delivered within minutes of the drinks and appetizer. I had ordered the Blue Bayou shrimp Poboy, I was surprised by how much shrimp was on the sandwich especially after how small the appetizer was. My food sat on the table untouched for nearly 10 minutes before our server came to check on us, finding my wife's entree had never been delivered. She went back to the kitchen to check, came back out to apologize and said that the missing entree would be delivered shortly. We waited another 15 minutes for my wife's shrimp and grits entree, my food was now cold and we began eating our dinner. The Poboy was not bad, even for being cold, it lacked some of the bold flavor you would expect for a Creole BBQ shrimp poboy but was more than edible. The side of fries were very good, large portions of shrimp and fries. My wife said the shrimp and grits were okay, not as good as the same dish from the Ruby Slipper I had ordered for breakfast on the same day for significantly less money. But she did enjoy the dish well enough.

The server did offer to comp a glass of wine to make amends for the poor timing of the service, we declined and finished our meal. We found the service at this restaurant to be seriously lacking compared to the other establishments we visited during our visit to the city. The prices were on par with higher end establishments, but it falls short of the competition in my experience. We didn't walk in with any expectations, but we left disappointed with the overall experience. We would not return or recommend this restaurant. There are too many great places to enjoy good food and drink in this city, avoid this lackluster tourist trap.

Also of note - this restaurant charges an additional 3% on card payments, and they're a cashless business. So expect all prices to be an...

Blue Bayou was the worst dining experience I've ever had. I'll explain why in detail, but here is TL;DR: food is overpriced and mediocre and service is awful. Went here on a Wednesday evening around 7:30, party of 4. We were quickly seated by hostess. The restaurant was busy but not packed, and the bar had a few patrons. Our server was Briana, and it took a long time before she came to the table. She was not friendly and reminded me of an angry middle school student. She took our drink orders, alligator bites app, and left. Probably 15 minutes or more passed. No drinks; no water. Alligator bites arrived. They were very good. She came back to the table, muttered something about the bar and happy hour (still not sure what she said, but it was probably about the bar being busy) and asked if we were ready for entrees. All this was done with whatever the opposite is of care and concern. We all ordered entrees. Shortly afterwards, a bus person accidentally stacked plates too high and one slid off the bus crate onto the floor. There was a crash and broken bits of plate landed on the table, in my sandal, and on the booth seat. Something, food or liquid, splashed on the edge of the booth seat. Servers quickly cleaned it up and were mildly apologetic. While they were still cleaning it up, Briana comes back with drinks and serves them while the broken plate and food waste is still being cleaned up. Our entrees arrive fairly quickly. Additional servers carelessly begin to give out the entrees. Briana reaches over the table with a plate of gumbo and sloshes a large portion of it on the table. It splashes and gets on my face, shirt, and shorts. She says absolutely nothing. She comes back with a wet rag and wipes up the gumbo. She still says nothing, even though it is obvious the gumbo spilled on me. For the price of the gumbo and the amount spilled, that alone should have warranted some sort of action. I now wait for my etouffee. It arrives and is mediocre. It did have a decent rue flavor. The crawfish were soft and mushy. There was nothing special about it. Absolutely over priced. One would think that a manager would come and check on the table after all of this (other servers saw the gumbo spill) but nobody seemed to care. Later, I went to the restroom and Briana was in the hallway on her phone. She glanced up at me. We made eye contact. Perhaps it was my imagination, but she seemed to be annoyed that I was looking at her. Still no apology or any sort of human emotion. As the "experience" was ending, she seemed to lean into her bad attitude. Even while using the remote point of sale, she flicks it with one of her fingers to me. I honestly don't remember ever being treated so poorly. The entire experience was...

All the reviews on Blue Bayou seemed great but little did we know there was a sign to leave a review on the table to get free cheesecake so I initially wrote a solid review initially, but after going to the BB I had to take it down. We showed up for a reservation at 7. We get seated towards the back left corner. We sat for a while until a server took our drink order. We ordered a bottle of wine and a margarita and some waters. 3 appetizers and everyone ordered our entrees because we figured the service would continue to be slow. The first oysters appetizer come out but no other apps. Then we are brought a glass of wine and we were like no it was a bottle, so they take it back and the server comes over and says we don’t have that wine chilled do you want something else. By then the wait seemed to 15 -20 mins so we tell him never-mind. Then two of the entrees finally come out and we tell the guys to eat. They are nearly done when the server checks on us and realized the burger didn’t come out. We tell him we also ordered another entree that didn’t come out. He looks at his little white thing and is like you didn’t order a 4th entree. So we tell him to never mind if it’s not even put in. The burger comes out. The burger was squeezed down but the fries were amazing. The server comes over to give us the bill and he goes over it because we told him we didn’t want to pay for the items that we didn’t get. So he says… for the third time here’s what you ordered. We never went over it with him so we believe the hostility was from earlier regarding the 4th entree he said he didn’t order. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It wasn’t representative of the experience we had in New Orleans the whole week we were here. We went up to the host stand to tell her how bad it was and she wanted to get a manager. We told her no as we were just visiting and didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but felt they needed to know. Finally I recommend you proceed with caution to the Blue Bayou. The vibe seems cool but it didn’t live up to...