Palo — Restaurant in Providence

Long story short: This is a dive bar with expensive finger foods and if you want to take the chance on your experience of incredibly rude wait staff then go for it. I came here after doing some research of Providence restaurants and seeing this name pop up a lot. I took a chance bringing my girlfriend here for her birthday, based off the good things people said online. However, after the treatment received by the wait staff (specifically a female bartender - our waitress was great) we will never be returning and have already told friends and family to stay away from here. Let me state that the food was good, the potatoes were the best dish out of everything we ordered (calamari, charcuterie, iberico, meatballs). I enjoy the style of tapas. However, my girlfriend and I do not drink alcohol. We tried viewing the mobile menu (as they do not have physical/paper menus) and when the server asked us for drinks we asked if we could have some type of virgin margarita/mojito (there was a menu item of a mint virgin drink we did not see). She takes our orders and then to our surprise, another female who turned out to be the bartender approaches us asking who ordered the non alcoholic drinks. It was both of us, and she said something along the lines of "what do you expect me to put in a margarita without alcohol?" With a very condescending tone and attitude. We were both baffled and had we not already ordered our food we would have left. We were simply asking for them to make us some variation of a margarita or mojito. She spoke to us like we had asked for her social security number, and couldn't comprehend that we asked for a virgin drink. We are aware it's made with alcohol. But YOU are the bartender. If you want us to tell you how to make it we can Google a recipe but to come back and approach us with such attitude is a terrible environment. Our waitress was nice and she seemed almost embarrassed that the bartender had approached us that way. I then found someone who I thought was the manager, turned out to be the owner, and told him about the entire experience. He said they don't have the ability to make every drink, but he understands the information should have been relayed in a nicer way. And then also made a comment along the lines of trying to "keep that bartender behind the bar" as in not to come out and interact with customers, which seemed like a silly enough joke/remark to lighten the mood but sounds like this isn't the first time this bartender has been rude to customers. Again the food was good but after that experience we will NEVER be returning. Completely ruined a birthday dinner off of rude treatment. If you are in the hospitality and customer service industry you should never talk to your...

Wow, buckle up; it's a great story with no exaggerations. We arrived a few minutes early for our Friday 8:30 reservation for 2. It took about 15 minutes for the host to greet us and another 10 for them to clean one of the several dirty tables all the while listening to a strange hybrid of various kinds of elevator music. In total, 25-30 minutes to get to the table.

The waitress came to the table to take our drink orders, a water for me and a glass of wine for my wife; seeing the current service, we also immediately put in our dinner orders in. The waitress said she would be right back, and in that time, we spotted a cocktail on the menu that my wife was interested in. When the waitress returned, we asked her "if it's not too late, could we switch from our wine to this cocktail?" She kinda stood there for a minute, then another waitress brought not one, but two glasses of wine to the table. One of which was poured in a glass with what looked to be a large green snot. Our waitress apologized, and told us that she would put in for the other drink.

Moments later, she returns with one of the glasses of wine and tried to pressure my wife into taking it because she claimed it had already been poured by the time she put in for it. She waited a moment or two for us to accept it before overruling herself and telling us she could take it off the bill.

Finally, the food arrived. we ordered the charred shrimp, swordfish skewers, some type of bread with vomit on top of it, and two orders of beef sliders. Everything before the sliders was dry, mushy, strange, or downright gross. But we made it to the sliders which we were both stunned to say were good. It's possible they were only good in comparison to the rest of the food we ate, but I digress.

At last, we were finished. The waitress brought the bill and began a last ditch speech to guilt us into a tip; neither of us felt the service was deserving of such. We payed $50 of the total $61 with a "gift" card.

It would be a crime not to share this evening which was, at times, so bad it...

Excellent food and ambience, terrible service by server. We were there dinner yesterday and ordered 7 tapas dishes and a bottle of wine. After finishing a meal, we ordered a cheese plate as a dessert to pair with the red wine left. The last dish we had was ox tail and our silverware got soaked up with oils from the dish. We asked the server to change our silverwares and the server told us, "we are out of silverware. You have to wipe them up and use". I was literally shocked. There were empty seats at the restaurant with silverware available on the table, and as soon as she told it to us, new stacks of plate and silverware arrived and another staff was placing them to the shelf of bar area, right in front of where we were sitting. We are pretty sure she noticed it as well, but she did not bother to check. We did not want to bother to ask the sever again and we just used the silverware for cheese and obviously, the flavor of oxtails got mixed up. After all the dishes taken, we were waiting for our check. Even before the check was arrived, the same server started spraying cleaning detergent right in front us, at the table and started wiping out. Wow, it almost got to our face because she was spraying aiming high from distance and we could smell the strong detergent right after we finished our dinner. On our way out, we tried to let the manager, Carlos, know what has happened. However, he did not respond in a sensible way. He just nodded, and said, alright. No appropriate way of apology or empathy shown. Very disappointed to the service we had at this...