Ayat Industry City — Restaurant in New York

I made a reservation at the Bay ridge location for a party of 5 at the upstairs dinning hall and confirmed via text when the automated message was received days before the actual reservation. When we arrived, there was no host at the entrance, we waited about 10 minutes as servers were walking past us and others were in conversations. We were told the host would be back, that they are understaffed, or not allowed to seat guests. After patiently waiting we FINALLY had someone check us in (surely because we were blocking other parties from checking in and commenting on their service).

This is where it gets good - my party and I are all ready to be served this great food that everyone been talking about and we too wanted to have the same great experience as everyone else. That is nowhere near what happened.

We speak to the host and let her know we have a reservation. Not only did she walk away from the conversation to collect a check because she was waived down but she had the SERVER check us in but our reservation was nowhere to be found. Though I showed him the proof and confirmation, he told me that there was nothing that he could do because my reservation could not be found (it was nearly dinner time so the place was starting to slowly fill) I have no idea what the host whispered to him, but my party of 5 was told that we had to sit on the first floor, near the entrance door…more like directly behind the door and check in line…at a table that could HARDLY sit 4 people.

Now, we’re not usually the ones to be picky about the seating, however, we were celebrating a birthday and had planned this in advance because we knew of the seating arrangements in this location. I’ve been to the other locations and have not had any experiences close to this. It made no sense to sit 5 people at a square table that can’t even sit 4 people comfortably. When we told them that we had reservations on the 2nd floor we were told that it was ONLY for larger parties. This was absolutely not true and even if it was, then the option shouldn’t have been available when we made the reservation. The host/server were not being accommodating and essentially told us that the table we were seat at was the ONLY one available. When we told them we could CLEARLY see open tables from outside of the restaurant and that there are smaller groups dining on the 2nd floor. Both the server and host just walked away. At the bare minimum, they could've just called prior to the reservation to let us know that the seating wasn’t available and avoided this whole mess.

At this point we were hungry and have already spent so much time waiting and trying to have them be a bit more flexible at least with the sizing of the table. We ended up agreeing to just take the table. When we were seated, we were only given 4 menus and RUSHED to go through those menus because they didn’t have enough to circulate.

We ordered 2 appetizers and 4 entrees to share between the group. We had absolutely no space on the table. Not even for just the 2 appetizers, 5 mini serving plates, and our bottle of tap water. We were so fed up to a point that we were putting our empty plates at the open table beside ours (it was either the empty table or the floor) We weren’t even given cups for our water. Our table was not cleared and cleaned for our entrees. We had to flag someone to take the plates for us.

Now we order 4 entrees but the table could only hold 2-3 of those which made the entrees arrive staggered. Some of us were eating while others were just watching (due to the different dietary restrictions). As the evening went on we became the forgotten guests in the corner. But sitting us there also revealed to us how the service truly is. Watching people with party of 3 get seated where we reserved, accommodations being made for larger groups, servers and hosts giving their all to the larger parties while the “smaller tables” gets served whenever they remember.

All of this to say - they have great food but fails terribly at the hospitality and...

Ayat (the one located in Industry City on 36th Street) is a really cool place to go for Palestinian food. My friends and I decided to go here after seeing the cool rooftop deck from across the street while in Japan Village.

When we walked through the front door the smell of food was delicious and we went up the stairs to eat outdoors on the rooftop and were delighted with the decor and seating options - we had the entire upstairs to ourselves (it was a Thursday night at 8 pm, so we were lucky).

When we sat down, we were presented with cool two-sided wooden menus and a basket of hot pita and some oil, spices and olives. The menu is very simple and the descriptions of the foods were helpful, but I opted to look up pictures of the dishes in the internet to get a good idea of exactly what we might be ordering as we weren't familiar with some of the dishes.

We ordered a mezze platter as an appetizer and the maklouba (a 2 person chicken dish, as well as lemonades. The Iemonade was particularly delicious.

The presentation of the food was cool, and the water cups look like little clay terra-cotta bowls and the plates are all the same terra-cotta style, which I really liked.

The food was all really good. I wanted to try many different things, but I'll have to go back to try more.

I really loved the laid back dining experience and I recommend Ayat to anyone who likes Palestinian food, but even if you aren't knowledgeable about Palestinian, you can rest assured that you'll like it if you like Middle Eastern food.

My only qualm with the experience is that we were charged $10 unexpected dollars at the end of the day. Unlike most places that serve you some sort of bread when you first arrive, if you run out of bread while eating your appetizer (which was a massive multi-person platter that really should come with its own basket of pita) when you ask for more bread it is replenished at no charge and the server didn't inform us that it would cost more.

I was surprised to find that we were charged for $3 for the extra pita @ $1 per pita. The same thing happened when we were presented with the large dinner platter and ran out of the white sauce that comes with the plate, when we asked for more, the server just shook her head affirmatively and brought it to us without warning us that this little bowl of white sauce that comes with the platter would cost us $7 more.

It's not a good feeling to look at your bill at the end of your dining experience and find unexpected charges on there. The proper thing to do is let your customers know that when they are asking for replenishments of items that already come with their food to let them know there is a cost associated.

In this specific case, nowhere on the entire menu does it say that pita is an item on the menu and therefore there's no way to know that asking for more pita would cost anything. Similarly, when ordering the maklouba, nowhere on the menu does it say that it comes with a specific sauce that's on the menu, but when I looked at the bill I saw the $7 charge for a small Khyar ma laban, which I had no idea I was receiving with the meal. If I had known, I just wouldn't have ordered it. I had full knowledge that by ordering an additional lemonade that there would be a cost since it's on the menu as an item because that's an obvious menu item.

Other than this minor issue, I still enjoyed the experience and I would recommend the place to Palestinian / Middle Eastern...

We were excited to try this place given the awesome patio area and cool mural. However, the service was all over the place, super disorganized and it was clear the staff was confused and not paying attention. They brought us hot tea that was room temperature then took nearly the whole meal to bring out hot tea.

The bathroom also had no soap (even though it’s the bathroom employees use). It did have hand sanitizer.

The staff frequently did not know what was in food or even what they were bringing out to us.

They also brought out dry bread that room temperature to us, but then brought out warm bread made in house to other tables and only brought us that bread when we asked. They also didn’t package the bread correctly so that it quickly dried out and became unpleasant.

Some food was like the grape leaves were good, but other things like the fattoush was clearly missing essentials like mint and lemon juice. We asked for lemons that helped but it was clear no one was managing the place on a busy Friday night.

We saw who we thought was the hostess leaving people not greeted and unsat for 10+ minutes. She was definitely busy but the staffing and organization was inadequate.

They also add a surprise 4% credit card charge on the bill that’s not mentioned in the menu or anywhere in the place .

This place is brand new but they really need to figure out how to run it. It’s not okay...