Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill — Restaurant in Oklahoma

Pardon the long review, but they did a lot to earn the stars. Note first that our server was excellent, I don't think she was involved in what happened.

I live in Oklahoma. My family flew 1800 miles to visit OK for the first time. They are big country music fans and "I Love This Bar" was on the top of their list to visit, so we drove an hour to Winstar.

There were 11 of us. We went on a weekday for lunch and arrived about 2PM. The restaurant was maybe 25% full, but the hostess had a very hard time accomodating us. First they went to the restaurant side, pulled 2 4 top tables together, walked around, talked, and after a 10 minute process, decided we would be better at a 6 top in the bar. When we realized that they were going to try to put 11 people at a table for 6 we said "wait, that won't work". Why don't you pull TWO of those tables together (the entire bar area was empty). At that point the said they couldn't accomodate us. We walked away, very, very disappointed.

We hadn't walked far when we found a manager in the casino. His name was Marcus and he turned out to be far above the manager level. Marcus walked us back to the restaurant and instructed the servers to accomodate us.

Once we were seated, (and remember the restaurant was NOT busy at all) the server took our drink orders for the bar and our appetizer orders. After about 15 minutes or so our food showed up. But no drinks. We asked the server. She said we would get them right away. Still nothing. Finally, when we were done with our food, the drinks showed up. We chalked it up to confusion on the part of the wait staff.

We ordered our SECOND drinks. And waited. And waited. (remember, this is still early afternoon, we had nothing stronger than coffee before our arrival at the restaurant). When we finally asked the server what was going on, we were told that the bartender had decided not to serve us.

It was a terribly uncomfortable and embarassing situation. *There was absolutely no reason for this unless the staff was punishing us in the only way they knew how for getting Marcus involved. * I guess we should have gone to find the restaurant manager, but at that point, we were DONE. We will NEVER go back there again. So I guess the...

I will start with saying that Toby Keith does wonderful things for our veterans and being a disabled veteran this was a hard review to wtite.

Note: This was our first visit and we will give the restaurant a second chance to prove this was a one time thing.

And now the review...

Unfortunately the only good thing about this visit was the drinks. My conyac and my wife's mixed drink were excellent.

We were not impressed with the food on our first visit to this famous restaurant. My wife ordered the steak and chicken. The steak was cold, and I mean cold to the touch. She had me touch it and it felt like an ice cube, actually cold. It was cooked so I am not sure how they made it cold but it was. I ordered the prime rib. It was smoked and the smoked flavor was overwhelming and a little to spicy for my taste. If you like spicy, heavily smoked flavoring you might enjoy the prime rib.

We also watched a waitress spill a tray of shrimp and all the sauces on a lady. It stayed on the floor and her chair for almost 5 minutes until a manager saw it and had someone clean it up. They never even apologized to her for the accident and she made sure everyone knew as she was leaving.

To top everything off it took over 1hr 12min to get our cold and overly seasoned food. You may say that is an odd thing to exactly know the time like that but I know this because I received a text shortly after we were seated and I used the time the text arrived for the starting point. All total we were seated in the restaurant for just under 2 hours, remember they had to fire a new steak for my wife so this was not us eating slowly.

The prices did not appear to be unreasonable had the meal been what was expected but for what we received it was over priced.

I realize sometimes people have bad days and maybe a lot of Toby Keith's employees were just having a bad night.

I expected better from Toby Keith's so I will try it one more time and hopefully it...

To begin, it's already frustrating to see that the response to every 1-star review is a copy and paste to fill out the contact form. This informs me that the poor service has no in-house accountability, and further explains why we have consistently, over the last two years of frequent travels through OKC and stopping here, we have experienced terrible service.

Cleanliness: The dining room tables and floor are consistently not clean. We went there recently, and they tried to seat us at a table where there was food all over the floor and a drink was spilled all over my chair. I asked for a new table, which they honored, saying they would clean it. They didn't. Instead, I saw, 20 minutes later, they seated another family, to which, I politely chimed in and let them know about the drink. They re-sat the family. Unbelievably, it still wasn't cleaned, and they sat a 3rd family there, only for me to miss it (as if it was my job) and a child sat in the drink-spilled chair by accident in a baseball uniform. Then they cleaned it. Last time we went, just two days ago, there was food and fries all over the floor where we were sat.

Lazy waitstaff. We consistently wait several minutes after being seated during uncrowded times to be greeted. Usually over 10 minutes. Furthermore, just plan to wait for your drinks.

Hosts. I always get a souvenir glass from their giftshop every visit. We went the other day, we went to the gift shop, to which there were four hosts standing there, not busy, but on their phones. We waited. And waited. Then, I walked over and asked for help. The lady who came to help us made us still finished sending her text message before helping us. Wow.

The nostalgia that the atmosphere of this restaurant provides is why we have made this a frequent place to visit when we travel through okc (which is often).

Unfortunately, the consistent poor service is...