Parlay Bar & Lounge — Restaurant in Richmond

Wow! What an awful experience. We visited the restaurant on September 1st around 4:30 PM for an early dinner. Our party included my wife and myself (both in our 60s - retired.). My brother-in-law (retired as well) and his wife and our son, a local Richmond dentist.

Let me start by saying that I spent years in food and beverage service and management and fully understand how difficult it can be - especially if it's really busy (It wasn't). However, having owned five different companies, I know how important it is for the owner to find out what's going on with day-to-day operations. With this in mind, I hope to speak with the owner very soon.

To be fair, our server, Megan, wasn't terrible. She was a tad slow, but we understand not all servers have the same level of experience. Although our food came out kind of late - and not at the same time - but for the most part it was pretty darn good.

Having said that, everything started to unravel when we ordered two more vienna lager beers and they didn't come out for about 15 minutes. We had our food, but no water or anything to drink. As such, my brother-in-law went in to the bar area to see what was going on with the beer order.

As it turns out, they had blown the keg. (No big deal - I remember rhe experience as I have probably swapped out thousands of kegs in my food and beverage career.) But, since they seemed to be having a difficult time getting the keg swapped out at the bar, my brother-in-law asked if he could just order a different beer so he could have something to drink with his food while they swapped out the keg. He ordered a single Pacifico beer to bring back to the table.

After a few minutes, a very light-haired blonde woman came to our table with three Pacificos. She also had our check although we had not asked to cash out. With a bit of an attitude, she told us we had ordered three Pacificos (we had not) and slapped down our check - basically kicking us out. Moreover, she accused my brother-in-law of spilling beer on a "patron". He did not.

Let's be very clear here. We are not big drinkers or partiers. We are retired people sitting there with our son trying to enjoy an early meal. We had not been drinking until we got there and had the one devil's backbone.

We're willing to give the bartender the benefit of the doubt that maybe she misunderstood his order. However, there's no excuse for treating customers the way she treated us. She also brought the general manager's card out when she brought the check. He walked out a few minutes later.

We explained to him that:

A. My brother-in-law did not spill beer on anybody.

B. We did not order the two Pacifico's. As a matter fact, I'm not sure we ever got our Vienna lagers that we did order.

The general manager went so far as to admonish us saying we were putting down his staff. From our perspective, his staff lied to us and then they treated us rudely.

Once again, I'd love to talk with the owner of the restaurant. Since I don't have contact information for that person, I'll simply post a review like this every day until I hear from that person.

Once again, when I owned businesses and people were being mistreated by my staff, I wanted to know about it. Feel free to post a response here with the owners contact...

Went here for the football games with some friends, first off I'd like to say that our server was very kind and quick and helpful and this is in no way a reflection on her. Over the course of our time here multiple managers came up to us multiple times telling us we'd be kicked out of our seats for other people during the later in the day games, which is fine but by the 5th reminder in the middle of the game we are trying to watch it gets frustrating. Those same managers also told us we were far off from reaching our $300 minimum, which was just a blatant and unnecessary lie that was easily fact checked between each other with our receipts after the fact. We sat next to a group with reserved seats as well, and even though we ordered considerably more food and alcohol than they did, they were not bugged by the management during the games even once. We are not regulars and we are not personal friends with any of the staff and the managers at Parlay certainly did their best to make us aware of that fact. Was very much looking forward to having a new spot for sports on the weekends as someone who lives in Scott's Addition, but I think I will be sticking to to-go orders from now on (because the food is...

I reserved a bay at Parlay on Saturday for a group of 6 to watch collage football. We arrive and were immediately seated. We then waited 20 minutes and no server came. I went back to the hostess and asked if she could change the game at our bay, she informed me that our server could change it. To which I replied do we have one of those? Another 10 minutes passed and finally a server showed up. We ordered a bucket and asked to have our game put on. 30 more minutes passed, no bucket and still no game. I asked another server who went to bar and brought us the bucket that was just sitting there waiting to be brought to us. I asked her about the game and within 10 minuets she had it changed for us. 30 minuets later our original server came over to ask if we needed anything. By this point we had already started ordering from the bar because she hadn’t come by in so long. For the next 2 and 1/2 hours she never returned to see if we needed anything! Such a disappointing experience in what could be a...